Got off on a Jewish kick this time. Started off planning on doing
the Klezmatics and Art Brut. After I wound up quoting the latter's
Israel-Palestine line, I went scrounging. Once I found El Médioni the
pattern was set. Fields and London were revised from Recycled Goods.
Atzmon was a record that had just missed Jazz CG, but it's worth
noting, and doing it let me drop a plug for Exile. Gottlieb
was in the incoming queue. It's a not-so-radical release in John
Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series, which could have contributed
more interesting records. Rufus Thomas doesn't fit the pattern, but
I never planned on doing thematic columns -- although I do tend to
pair up complementary records, as with Dylan/Jewels & Binoculars
last week. One thing about this week's Jewish music is how varied
it all is.

Handed another one in today, with a cluster of world jazz, so the
cycle continues.

Letter to publicists:

The Sept. 28 installment of my weekly F5 Record Report is now out all
over Wichita KS. The URL below will get you the latest column, and
the "next article" link will cycle you back through the old columns.
http://www.f5wichita.com/mba.php?id=55
The columns are also archived and indexed at:
http://www.tomhull.com/ocston/arch/f5/
I send these notices out each week, but only to publicists connected
to records reviewed that week. This week, the label index is:
Concord (Stax): Rufus Thomas
Downtown: Art Brut
Enja: Gilad Atzmon
JMG: The Klezmatics
Piranha: Maurice El Medioni, Frank London
Reboot Stereophonic: Irving Fields
Tzadik: Ayelet Rose Gottlieb
Thanks for your interest and support.

Music: Current count 12396 [12361] rated (+35), 900 [897] unrated (+3).
This week's bump came mostly from working on Recycled Goods, and more
specifically from working off the bottom of the deck there. Pain focuses
the mind, providing a strong incentive to make up my mind on one play.

Art Brut: Bang Bang Rock & Roll (Downtown):
Unlikely to succeed in their ambition to write "the song that makes
Israel and Palestine get along," let alone one "as universal as
Happy Birthday." But they vary their guitar-band art punk with
enough panache to wow critics, or anyone able to savor their
references or cope with the irony of decrying songs about sex
and drugs after exclaiming over seeing a new girlfriend naked
and demanding a drug that works. A-

Atmosphere: You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having
(2005, Rhymesayers): Ant's beats are harder and samples thicker than
I'm used to with this duo, which makes it harder to follow Slug's words --
aside from his Iraq diagnosis ("what the fuck did you expect?"), and
his uncertain advice to "Little Man," which is what made him interesting
to follow in the first place.
B+(***)

Roy Brown: The Complete Imperial Recordings (1956-58
[1995], Capitol): Not a major figure, although his "Good Rockin' Tonight"
was a landmark even if a lucky strike -- the original was by Wynonie
Harris. That was on the rather inconsistent King anthology Rhino put
out in 1994. This is more rock-influenced, with Fats Domino a factor,
and some indication that he's been listening to Elvis toward the end.
B+(*)

Coldplay: X&Y (2005, Capitol): Keyboard-led
English group, rocks harder than their prog brethren; tougher than
Radiohead, maybe even Blur, but pussies compared to Manic Street
Preachers. Liked their previous album, A Rush of Blood to the
Head, better. B

Franz Ferdinand (2004, Domino): A largish hit with a
substantial critical following. It's easy enough to see why: the guitar
band rock is fast and crisp, a couple of songs sharp enough to hook,
nothing dull enough to miss. Working quick off a library copy, which
is enough to make me cautious, but I can why they clicked. B+(***)

Journey: Greatest Hits (1978-96 [2006], Columbia/Legacy):
They had 17 Top 40 hits from 1979-87, plus one from the 1996 reunion
counted as a bonus here; this loses five and adds three -- don't know
why, but it's unlikely to matter; skipping past the bulk that plain
sucks, their hits were interchangeable, contentless stealth rock --
perfect once radio decided the key to share was simply not provoking
listeners to change the channel.
C

Sonya Kitchell: Words Came Back to Me (2006, Velour):
Seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter from western Massachusetts. Has
a voice that reminds me a bit of Joni Mitchell, except on a blues that
has Janis Joplin in mind. An appealing debut, but half a dozen plays
have left me feeling something's missing -- perhaps it's too easy to
say experience and suffering, but that could be it. B

Anne McCue: Koala Motel (2006, Messenger): Australian
singer-songwriter, doesn't have Kasey Chambers' voice or local detail,
but she's probably been focusing more on Lucinda Williams, who appears
on one track, is evidently a fan, and certainly a model. McCue plays
all the guitar here aside from a bit of pedal steel. B+(*)

Putumayo Presents: Music From the Wine Lands
(1991-2005 [2006], Putumayo World Music): They've done coffee, tea,
chocolate -- I tried lobbying for cocaine, but they insist on keeping
their vices, like their pop music, legal and mellow; the only thing
remarkable here is that you can take thirteen songs from eleven
countries and make them all sound the same -- the wines vary more
than this.
B

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 8)

Didn't get into the replay shelves this week, mostly because I
spent the first half working on Recycled Goods. That also explains
why this week's prospecting starts with more world-oriented items.
More Recycled early this week, then I'll work on pulling a Jazz CG
together. Don't know any more about what's going on at the Village
Voice, although I can think of some pretty good arguments why they
should keep Jazz CG going.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb: Mayim Rabim (2006, Tzadik):
These notes are necessarily quick reactions, as opposed to fully
considered reviews, so sometimes my reactions stray from the text.
Sometimes I bring up aspects of the process, like when I complain
about having to work off slipcase promos -- by the way, I always
get fan mail when I do that. This isn't even that: just a CDR in
a purple plastic wrapper, stapled to a relatively fancy press kit.
I assume this is all John Zorn's fault, but let me explain. When
I started this column, Tzadik was very high on my label wish list.
I was told that they never send promo copies out, but that as a
press person I could buy discounted copies at the same price they
sell copies to their artists. Now, if you're a consumer, that's a
good deal -- I've bought a couple of things on my long-term wish
list, and should buy some more if/when I ever find the time/money.
But it's way too expensive to go fishing. And while Tzadik produces
some of the most interesting records around, they also put out some
very strange, even unlistenable, shit. So the writer economics are,
to say the least, dicey, but the "artist price" bothers me too. I
do manage to get a few Tzadik records in the mail, either directly
from the musician or through a publicist the musician hired, and
every time that happens Tzadik's cash register rings in my head.
Gottlieb figured a way around that -- while I don't like working
off this, I can't say as I blame her. As for the music, she seems
to see herself as a jazz singer, but this is something else. She's
taken texts from the "erotic biblical love poem Song of Songs."
Sung in Hebrew, I suspect the translations lose something -- "My
beloved stretched forth his hand from the hole/And my insides beat
wildly"? The voices radiate over clever arrangements of clarinet,
piano, cello and percussion, unpeeling the popular artifacts of
Jewish music to reveal roots that sound timeless.
B+(*)

David Krakauer: Bubbemeises: Lies My Grandma Told Me
(2006, Label Bleu): Front cover credits also include Socalled and
Klezmer Madness. Socalled is credited with samples and sequences.
Klezmer Madness is the band. Socalled was around for Krakauer's
2004 Live in Krakow, but fits in much tighter here -- in
many cases the tracks begin with the samples, beats and a bit of
rap, which sets up a contrast that Krakauer's manic tendencies have
long needed.
[B+(***)]

Raúl Jaurena: Te Amo Tango (2005 [2006], Soundbrush):
Tango may have originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires, but these
days it extends from popular dance to classical music. This sounds
more classical than most, thanks to the Sinopus String Quintet, the
operatic singer Marga Mitchell on four tracks, and to the slow grind
of bandeonist Juarena's dense melodies -- an intensity that works,
up to a point.
B+(**)

Vittor Santos: Renewed Impressions (2005 [2006],
Adventure Music): It's very rare to hear a Brazilian record with a
lead horn of any sort, much less trombone. Santos doesn't do anything
very fancy: his tone is somewhat muted, just short puffs leading the
piano-bass-drums (or in two instances Hamilton de Holanda's mandolin).
But in the context of this relaxed samba that's definition enough. A
Mario Adnet tune, "An American in the Samba," is especially delightful.
[A-]

The Andy Biskin Quartet: Early American: The Melodies of
Stephen Foster (2000 [2006], Strudelmedia): Biskin is a
clarinettist, originally from Texas, studied at Yale, worked for
Alan Lomax, now in New York. The quartet gets an old-fashioned
sound from Chris Washburne on trombone and tuba; Pete McCann plays
banjo as well as guitar, and John Hollenbeck drums. Biskin slips
four originals in with the Foster tunes. The latter strike me as
sounding ancient and fragile, at points awkwardly so. Not sure to
what extent this is deliberate, or matters.
[B]

Andy Biskin: Trio Tragico (2005 [2006], Strudelmedia):
The contrast to Biskin's clarinet comes from Dave Ballou's trumpet.
The third wheel is bassist Drew Gress, who provides background and
some pulse, but has neither the ability to drive nor accent that has
made drummers the norm in two-horn trios. It also seems like the two
horns play in unison a lot, which puts the focus back on the composer
and his clarinet. He's doing some interesting things here -- possibly
building on his evident interest in early Americana.
[B+(*)]

Mark Feldman: What Exit (2005 [2006], ECM): Most of
the time I play the stereo at moderately low volume, often opposed
to those annoying "play it loud" instructions some labels like to
affix. One consequence of this is that I've developed a pet peeve
over faintly recorded segments which tend to disappear under the
hum of the computer fans, not to mention the notorious Kansas wind
and the occasional tornado siren. This got off on the wrong foot
with a segment long enough I wound up checking the health of the
equipment. When I went back and turned it up, I found interesting
composerly moments, with Anders Jormin's bass reinforcing Feldman's
violin, and pianist John Taylor taking scenic sidetrips. They can
generate some momentum when they want, but not much volume. The
sort of record that gains stature the more you get into it, but
for my purposes, at 70+ minutes, it's more work than it's worth.
B

Keith Jarrett: The Carnegie Hall Concert (2005
[2006], ECM, 2CD): I don't dislike Jarrett. I wouldn't argue with
anyone who ranked him as one of the most important jazz pianists
of the forty years he's been recording. Beyond that it's hard to
say. Few people have recorded as much, as long, at such a high
level -- Cecil Taylor is one that jumps to mind, but that's a
tough comparison to make; looking through my lists, I'd say the
most comparable pianist to Jarrett is Abdullah Ibrahim, and that's
high praise. Nonetheless, I get a little tired with the constant
volley of trio and solo albums that are about all Jarrett has done
over the last twenty-plus years. This one is a solo. The booklet
lists all of Jarrett's ECM solos. How many? Counting this one, 24,
including 11 doubles and one 6-CD set -- 40 discs in all. The few
I've heard, excepting The Köln Concert, all tend to blur
together for me. This doesn't strike me as exceptional, but two
notes: I thoroughly enjoyed "True Blues," but then I have Otis
Spann albums that are at least as true; and I find the applause
distracting and ultimately annoying, partly because it makes me
wonder what he get to elicit that applause. Maybe it was just
being so good for so long?
B

Mitchel Forman: Perspectives (2005-06 [2006],
Marsis Jazz): Pianist, including electronic keyboards. Not familiar
with his own albums. Most of his side credits seem to be fusion
(starting with John McLaughlin) and pop jazz (Chuck Loeb, Rick
Braun, Jeff Golub, Najee, list goes on), but two early credits
were with Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz. This is half acoustic,
half synthesized, often with sequenced percussion. Two originals,
two Beatles songs, various covers which most likely represent a
personal view of the tradition -- Hancock, Corea, McLaughlin,
Shorter, Ron Carter, Russell Ferrante, and most importantly two
from Keith Jarrett. Coming after Jarrett in my queue, this popped
my ears right up. Will have to play it some more.
[B+(***)]

Omer Avital: The Ancient Art of Giving (2006,
Smalls): After Frank Hewitt, Israeli bassist Avital is the second
little-known Smalls regular Luke Kaven has set out to document.
Volume 1 was compiled from 1996 tapes and released earlier this
year as Asking No Permission. It featured a long list of
post-Branford saxophonists -- the best known being Mark Turner.
I found it hard to sort the compositions out from the clutter,
but a decade later he's got it nailed down. The quintet features
Turner on tenor sax, Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Aaron Goldberg on
piano, and Ali Jackson on drums. Avital's pieces set the horns
free -- neither Turner nor Cohen have pronounced avant leanings,
but they enjoy the freedom. Jackson avoids the hard bop clichés,
playing light and letting the rhythm slosh around a bit. Piano
gets a few nice runs too. Recorded live on two nights at Fat Cat.
Seems like I've been complaining about applause a lot recently,
so I should note that there is some here, but unlike the Jarrett
record, it's proportional, often coming at opportune moments --
always a good sign when the audience swings with the band.
A-

Frank Hewitt: Fresh From the Cooler (1996 [2006],
Smalls): Rules of thumb: I know what I like in a piano trio, but I
rarely know how to explain just why one is able to pique my interest
while so many others just sound like, well, so many others. It's
certainly important that the bass and drums stay in the game. Ari
Roland and Jimmy Lovelace qualify here, but barely -- aside from
some heavy-handed drums on "Tenor Madness," Hewitt's piano is key
throughout. He just seems right on the mark. Need to check it again,
but my first impression is that this may top his first posthumous
album -- Hewitt was one of those guys who played for decades but
never made a record, at least before his death at 67 in 2002.
[A-]

Gilad Hekselman: Split Life (2006, Smalls):
Guitar-bass-drums trio, led by a young Israeli guitarist, with Joe
Martin on bass and Ari Hoenig on drums, recorded live at Fat Cat in
NYC. Similar to a piano trio, although jazz custom tends more toward
improvising single-note lines. Nice record, similar to another
half-dozen I've heard, mostly on Fresh Sound.
B+(*)

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further
listening the first time around.

Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Ensemble: The Messenger:
Live at the Original Velvet Lounge (2005 [2006], Delmark):
This is Chicago's answer to a traditional New Orleans tailgate
party, with Maurice Brown's trumpet to shine up Dawk's sax, and
Steve Berry's trombone to get it dirty again. No one is credited
with vocals, but that doesn't stop the shouts, hollers, whelps
and raps, let alone the patter.
B+(***)

Von Freeman: Good Forever (2006, Premonition): He's
always had a distinctively thin, fragile sound, so the surprise here
is how well he keeps it hidden. At 84, he may have slowed down, but
that's possibly because this mainstream quartet never pushes him. Even
so, sometimes he does reach for notes that aren't there, slipping into
a muffled screech. Only then does his sax balladry reverts to form.
B+(***)

9/11 and the Children of a Lesser God

It's a couple of weeks old by now, but Tony Karon has a remarkable
9/11
piece posted on his blog. It's about Israel, Palestine, Lebanon,
the Middle East, and most pointedly about us. If I started quoting it
I'd wind up quoting it all. But here's just the first line:

Imagine, on September 12 2001, Condoleezza Rice had jetted in to
town to tell New Yorkers that the smoldering ruins of the World Trade
Center and the two thousand lives lost there represented the "birth
pangs of a new Middle East" . . .

Postscript: I should have written more on this, but it
was late, and there was too much. Karon nominates Rami Khouri as
Person of the Year for his coverage and analysis of the recent
war in Lebanon, citing Khouri's invitation to Israeli journalists
"to take a more Jewish approach to their work!" This isn't irony.
It's shared heritage, forgotten by too many on all sides of the
divide. Karon cites Hillel's fundamental definition of Jewishness:
"That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all
the rest is commentary." Khouri cites Deuteronomy: "Justice, and
only justice, you shall pursue." Personally, I find that the word
"justice" has become so poluted with vengeance that I prefer to
use a simpler, less combative principle: respect. Pretty much
everything I have to say about politics derives from that one
principle.

The Storm

Ivor van Heerden describes himself as a disaster scientist. He was
born in South Africa, but was drawn to Louisiana, first to LSU, then
to the wetlands. He holds a Ph.D. in marine sciences, teaches civil
and environmental engineering, is deputy director of the LSU Hurricane
Center, and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health
Impacts of Hurricanes. His background and strategic position offers
a unique perspective on the Katrina disaster, as least in terms of
New Orleans.

I've also read Michael Eric Dyson's Come Hell or High Water:
Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, which provides a
good chronology of the hurricane and what happened after, as well
as a longer meditation on how race factors in, especially on the
response end. I don't want to go down that rathole, but my own view
is that race didn't factor much into the post-disaster fiasco. On
the other hand, there's no doubt that the poor were hit hardest and
had the least recourse, and the deep history there has much to do
with race. Indeed, the race politics of the Jim Crow south laid the
foundation for government that recognizes no responsibility to its
poor, while serving itself and its wealthy patrons with cronyism.
FEMA's response to Katrina is just one example of the application
of such Jim Crow politics -- minus the race baiting, mostly, but
with the same contempt for anyone not hooked into the ruling class.

But van Heerden is invaluable for understaning just what happened,
why it happened, what we knew about it and when, and how Katrina fits
into the general pattern of hurricane threats. In addition to his
scientific and engineering expertise, he was well connected, both to
the media and to various political bodies -- even though he wasn't
always welcome, as when the Army Corps of Engineers tried to obstruct
his investigation of their levee failures.

The following are some long quotes from van Heerden's book, The
Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina -- The Inside
Story From One Louisiana Scientist (2006, Viking). Mike Bryan is
listed as second author, probably deserving much credit for the easy
flow of the prose, but the story is told as a first-person memoir.
The first quote sums up [pp. 10]:

Over thirteen hundred citizens in Louisiana and Mississippi died
due to Hurricane Katrina -- the number as of February 2006, and
certain to go up, perhaps dramatically, as the missing are
reclassified. Six months after the storm, one hundred thousand
families were still homeless. Some of those deaths and some of those
dislocations were inevitable, because Katrina was a natural
disaster. Others -- the majority -- were man-made. I don't see how we
can avoid that conclusion. The levee systems failed inexcusably. We
now thoroughly understand the need for coastal restoration as a buffer
against the big storms, but land loss continues at an alarming rate.
So what next? Should we clean up and rebuild New Orleans -- to
the extent even possible -- if we then repeat the mistakes of the
past? No, because the point overlooked in much of the Katrina media
coverage is the fact that this hurricane was not the big
one. I've learned that people don't want to hear this, because it
makes them angry. But there it is.As Katrina should have
affected New Orleans proper, she was decidedly a medium hurricane.
Sometime in the foreseeable future a bigger storm will not take
that last-minute jog to the east and every square foot of New
Orleans -- all of it, not just 80 percent -- will be underwater, and
deeper underwater than this time. Unless, that is, the right measures
are authorized and funded immediately, then executed promptly and
properly.

I don't like to see good science pushed to the sidelines just
because it conflicts with narrow inteests pushing their self-serving
agendas. Such politics as usual helped to inundate New Orleans in
2005. If science and engineering had been allowed to play their proper
role in the development of policies for the wetlands and the levees,
we wouldn't be in this situation today. If nothing changes in the
future, one fifth of the state of Louisiana -- everything south of
Interstate 10, including the city of New Orleans in its entirety --
will disappear beneath the waves, gone for good, and we will have no
one to blame but ourselves. Future historians will be writing books
about the "Cajun Atlantis."

Hard as it is to believe, nature has actually given us a bit of a
second chance. There's something left to work with in New Orleans. We
must put aside the politics, egos, turf wars, and profit agendas if
we're going to reconstruct this city effectively, engineer proper
levees, and restore the buffering coastline.

Van Heerden surveys the various scientists working with him at LSU's
Hurricane Center, including a group he calls the "surge warriors" --
the people who gather the raw data for the Center's surge flow models,
which predicted the extent of flooding due to overtopping levees [p. 40]:

Notice that about half of the surge warriors are not American-born,
and no surprise. This is where we're at in this country today. More
and more of the faculty and the majority of graduate students in
engineering and physical scences are from foreign soil, and not just
at LSU, everywhere in the United States. American kids are not that
interested in long, demanding graduate programs that don't guarantee
riches in the end. I think MBA programs may be sucking more than their
fair share of the best students away from the sciences and
engineering.

There are various stories about FEMA's arrogance and incompetence.
At one point, van Heerden suggests the use of tent cities for evacuees:
they are cheap, easy to assemble, can be provisioned for, and keep folks
safe but close by so they can return quickly and maintain a labor pool
for clean-up. They're actually common practice in many parts of the
world, but FEMA rejected the idea out of hand, explaining that Americans
don't live in tents. Instead, they shipped folks everywhere, to places
with no provisions, while leasing cruise ships and buying up mobile
homes. On the other hand, the Center for Disease Control appears to
be just about the last bastion of science and sanity in the federal
government [p. 59]:

The CDC's two-page list of health impacts included West Nile virus,
rabies, waterborne gastrointestinal diseases, burns, pulmonary
irritations -- the usual suspects, and more -- and it was the job of
both our center at LSU and the CDC to be prepared to provide relief
officials and policymakers with the best information regarding all of
them. The CDC provides medical support teams to any state requesting
their help, and it also has rapid-assessment teams, a critical part of
any response to a major disaster. They can assure that the correct
medical supplies, health resources, and manpower are available as soon
as possible. Because of our research we could give them a good
heads-up on what to expect after Katrina.

I was not surprised by the CDC's prompt and efficient response to
the telltale surge model. They're on teh ball. Compared to some of the
FEMA officials with whom we had dealt in the past few years, they are
disciplined, scientific, fact-based, and results oriented.

A major part of the book concerns the levee failures and the Army
Corps of Engineers' responsibility and cover-up [pp. 94-95]:

It must be repeated: If the only sources of water in New Orleans
had been the rainfall from Katrina (seven to ten inches), the
predicted overtopping of the levees of the Intracoastal Waterway and
the Industrial Canals, the overtopping of the Lakefront Airport levee,
and the breach at the CSX railroad junction, the flooding in the
Orleans East and St. Bernard bowls on the eastern side of Greater New
Orleans would have been much less damaging, and the flooding in the
Orleans Metro Bowl, the heart of the city to the west, would have been
relatively insignificant. According to our latest calculations, 88
percent of the flooding in the Orleans Metro Bowl, by volume, was due
to the breaches on the London Avenue and 17th Street canals. In
Orleans East, 69 percent of the flood was due to breaches. In the
St. Bernard Bowl, 92 percent. Thus, on average, 87 percent of
all the water that ended up flooding the greater New Orleans metro
area was the result of levee failures that totaled less than 400 yards
on the drainage canals and 650 yards on the Industrial Canal.

Van Heerden's other major interest is in wetlands restoration
[p. 161-162]:

So the first point to know regarding the relationship of the
disappearing wetlands and the peril in this part of the state is the
irony that the flood-control measures necessary to create and then
protect the infrastructure in this entire part of the state are
contributing to the loss of land on which this infrastructure
sits. The second point is the impact of the oil and gas industry,
without which the state of Louisiana would practically collapse,
economically. Our wetlands are the nation's number-one source of crude
oil (pumping more than the Alaska pipeline) and the second-leading
source of natural gas, and in order to support and transport this
production the companies have carved, by one calculation, eight
thousand miles of cuts and canals throughout the wetlands. Since this
entire network ties into the Gulf of Mexico, it provides opportunity
for salt-water encroachment. It is subject to erosion and disrupts the
natural flow of waters in the marshes. The whole artificial system
works to the detriment of the wetlands. No one claims otherwise. The
third undisputed factor is shoreline erosion, inevitable at all times
but especially relevant when the natural sedimentation processes offer
no compensation.

More on wetlands [p. 167]:

Thanks to subsiding land and rising oceans, the southern part of
Louisiana is three feet lower than it was one hundred years ago,
relative to mean sea level. The state loses twenty-five square miles
of wetlands every year, over twenty times the rate recorded in the
early part of the last century, when wetlands gain for the most part
equaled wetlands loss. Since the 1930s, this has come to more than a
million acres of lost land. In another one hundred years, if we don't
get serious about rebuilding these wetlands, the land will be another
three feet lower and, for all practical (and aesthetic) purposes, no
longer land at all.

And more [p. 169]:

Real estate developers hungry for terra firma are running out of
acreage, so they dig canals to drain marshes and build ad hoc levees
to protect the new sod from storm surge -- until it doesn't. What
companies would ever insure such homes? Louisiana and Texas
traditionally rank one and two in flood insurance claims.
Increasingly, insurers are not writing homeowner policies in
the wetlands, or they attach an explicit rider excluding hurricane
damage. I hate to vote witht he insurance companies, but on this
issue, who could blame them?

Van Heerden takes apart what he calls the Army Corps of Engineers'
party line: "The levees were sound, but the event exceeded the
design. Congress told us to design to a Cat 3, and that's what we
did. Our hands were tied. Katrina was a Cat 4 storm." [p. 200]:

Simply not so, and at the LSU hurricane centers we were
immediately suspicious of this whole scenario. The lowest of the
levees in question were supposed to be fourteen feet above mean sea
level, and the ADCIRC surge models had predicted a surge in the lake
topping out at ten feet, maybe eleven, because the lake was on the
western, or weaker, side of Katrina, where sustained winds were 75
mph. That's a Cat 1 storm, folks. The catastrophic storm surge
had been to the east of New Orleans and, especially, on the
Mississippi coast. For New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain and the
levees, Katrina was not a major hurricane. It's that simple,
but as I mentioned in the introduction,I know from experience that
people don't want to hear this. They want to have lived through this
monster, and they want the catastrophe to have been caused by this
monster. In the city itself, this just wasn't the case.

In October, we got word from NOAA that, indeed, Katrina might have
been just a Cat 3 at landfall, and then the National Hurricane Center
confirmed the number in late December. Additionally, the forward speed
was fast, 14 mph to 17 mph, so over the lake and the city was a
fast-moving Cat 1 hurricane -- nothing approaching the storm the Corps
claimed the levees were designed to withstand.

Finally, this is his summary [pp. 289-290]:

I'm on record defending the radical idea that the same federal
government that drowned New Orleans with the failure of its levees
should compensate all of those who lost lives and homes. Instead, the
best we have come up with so far is the plan devised by Congressman
Richard Baker from suburban Baton Rouge to allot homeowners and
lenders 60 percent of the pre-Katrina value of their demolished
property. Sine the federal government is responsible for 100 percent
of the losses, why not compensate for 100 percent of them?
Still, coming from a conservative Republican, this was a pretty
radical, progressive idea, and is appreciated as such. Of course, the
Bush administration has declared the plan dead, but in February 2006,
Governor Blanco announced a state initiative that adds $4.2 billion
authorized by Congress for community development block grant funding
to the $6.2 billion already guaranteed. Blanco proposed a cap of
$150,000 on the money available to each homeowner to repair, rebuild,
relocate, or accept as a buyout. A program to register potential
homeowners is currently under way.

Let's face it. A just outcome for the homeowners is highly
unlikely. Lord knows there are plenty of civil cases shaping up
against various defendants, including the Corps, contractors, and
insurance companies, but this litigation is guaranteed to last
forever, and it is unlikely to deliver full justice to those who have
lost everything. The state of Louisiana cannot possibly afford to pay
for the program.

There are various drawings of levee cross-sections, details on the
underlying geology -- weak soils, sands, peat, all of which are bad
news, requiring steel piling to be driven much deeper than had been
done. (The post-flood repairs often go 50 feet deeper.) Also details
on the effect of canals, levees, destruction of barrier islands, and
so forth on wetlands. Also various political tidbits, like the story
of what he calls the "Pelican Brief" -- the short-lived post-flood
economic recovery bill that Louisiana's senators proposed, stuffed
to the gills with irrelevant pork projects. My favorite was a little
item where, just before the flood, Senator Vitter filed a bill to
promote mining the cypress trees that hold together the remaining
wetlands.

A big part of van Heerden's message is that it is technically
possible to build levees and flood control systems that, combined
with a major program of wetlands recovery, could keep New Orleans
and its key economic infrastructure secure from even a Category 5
hurricane. Of course, that doesn't factor in the likelihood of sea
level rise due to global warming. But more immediate problems are
still obvious: our system of profit-driven politics, real confusion
over risk management and the role of government, and the increasing
tide of contempt for science and reason. A good deal more than the
future of New Orleans rides on how we face up to those problems,
but it's hard to imagine a more graphic or immediate example.

One reason for doing this column is to get a chance to write about some
new records that I wouldn't normally be covering. But this one is unusual
in that extent. I usually get caught short and wind up recycling, but this
time only Jewels & Binoculars and Earl King come from my archives --
King is actually something I wrote for a future Recycled Goods, so even
it is appearing first here. Jewels & Binoculars is actually a couple
of years old, but occurred to me as a nice tie-in to the new Dylan.

Torture and Its Discontents

Reading Nikki Keddie's Modern Iran and the following quote
[pp. 254-255] jumps out at me, not only because torture is featured:

The Khomeinists used Tudeh support to help put down their other
opponents and to facilitate relations with Moscow. Until 1983 the
Tudeh was allowed to publish and spread its influence. In early 1983
the government turned on the Tudeh, arresting over seventy members,
including several from the Central Committee and the armed forces. The
party was accused of spying for the Soviet Union and planning to
overthrow the government. Their army officers were executed, while
ideologues like Ehsan Tabari and Nureddin Kianuri were imprisoned.
They then appeared on television asking for forgiveness and mercy,
condemning their past, implying their party was a spy network for the
Soviets, and saying that Shi-ism was superior to Marxism. Some
observers said the confessions, and also confessions during these
years by those with non-Tudeh affiliations, were based on torture and
drugs. Some of the Feda'iyan Majority were also arrested, and both
parties were declared illegal in May 1983. This left the IRP and the
Freedom Party the onlyparties allowed to function.

In April 1982 Ghotbzadeh was arrested; he confessed that he had
planned to oust the government and said [Ayatollah] Shariatmadari had
knowledge of the coup plot. Ghotbzadeh was executed, and Shariatmadari
was condemned and put under house arrest until his death in 1986. One
by one the Khomeinists had efficiently got rid of their rivals; the
rivals never united, and in several cases they helped the government
against one another.

Of course, Khomeini didn't introduce torture to Iran. Its use no
doubt goes back millenia, but before 1978 the practice was primarily
associated with SAVAK, Shah Reza Mohammed's US-trained and -equipped
secret police. Torture is a political tradition that persists through
revolutions, which merely change who is torturing whom. To take the
obvious example, the brutality of Lenin and Stalin was learned from
the Tsar's police, a continuity that gives Putin license to do much
the same. Torture is, therefore, not a practice of left or right, or
of any ideological interest. Torture is an instrument of power, used
to break whoever threatens that power. It shows who has the power to
hurt, indeed to destroy. But it also shows that the torturer has no
moral authority to govern -- by claiming power through ruthlessness,
they reduce themselves to oppressors, villains, madmen.

Russia and Iran have many such generations of such, as do many
nations scattered around the world. But they all have one thing in
common: they depend on the exclusion of some or nearly all of their
subject population from political representation and power-sharing.
The reason for this is that torture entails costs. The torturers are
psychically damaged by the experience. The tortured are sometimes
broken or killed, or sometimes just hardened. And while the fact of
torture may deter some opposition, it confirms the need to resist
and raises the stakes, leading to a more desperate, more violent
insurgency. Those are costs that political elites don't taken on
unless they've already written people off. For proof of this, look
not to dictators, who've written damn near everyone off, but to
democracies like Britain and France, who limited their torture to
the unfranchised in the colonies.

In Iran's case, the Shah, as an absolute monarch, was eventually
opposed by everyone, but especially SAVAK's targets on the left and
in the clergy. Khomeini led one key faction in the revolt against
the Shah, but was able to carve up all the other factions in order
to consolidate power first in the clergy and finally in himself as
Supreme Jurisprudent. The repression and megalomania of the Pahlavis
made this possible, with torture begetting torture, but even there
two events brought out the worst in Khomeini instead of holding him
to his more liberal pre-revolution advertisements: one was taking
the US embassy hostage, allowing him to focus revolutionary fervor
in a way that undercut more moderate factions; the other was Iraq's
invasion, which threw Iran into a long, brutal war of survival.

George Bush's case for torture is, likewise, pre-conditioned by
war, allegedly a desperate matter of survival, but it really seems
to be deeper seated -- in some childhood neurosis, where Bush is
convinced not only that bullying works but that he'll be applauded
for his toughness. This may well tap into one part of the national
psyche, but it runs against others: our sense that we are actually
decent, dignified, well-meaning folks, and our utter ignorance of
what the post-WWII government has done abroad in our name. The latter
is what makes us think they attacked us even though they've almost
invariably managed to do it over there, and the former makes us think
that they are deranged for doing so.

Of course, the other problem is that Bush's torture record hasn't
exactly worked out. Guantanamo has turned into a major embarrassment.
The CIA's kidnappings, secret prisons, and "special renditions" have
undermined public support, especially in Europe. Abu Ghraib was a
huge fiasco, and its impact on winning Iraq has been negative --
not that winning was actually ever in the cards. Much the same has
happened, more quietly, in Afghanistan, another looming failure. So
why exactly Bush wants to keep promoting such tactics isn't all that
clear -- or do I mean sane? It's not that torture never works, but
Khomeini used it to decimate a domestic opposition among a populace
where he started with enormous prestige and credibility -- both for
his religious credentials and for his steadfast opposition to the
Shah. Even there, it's hard to call isolated, war-torn, repressive
Iran much of a success -- worldwide public disapproval added to
the high costs of such tactics. On the other hand, Bush has no
such advantages, and all the more to lose.

Torture and the Holy Rollers

I've paid little attention to the various stories and debates over
torture that have plagued the Bush administration. Didn't the CIA
write the book on torture back in the '50s? Haven't they franchised
the practice through the School of the Americas that long? Somewhere
along that road I've lost the ability to be shocked, so it surprises
me when others are shocked -- especially given how bloodthirsty the
administration's supporters seem to be. But today's Wichita Eagle
editorial today came out against Bush's bill to cover his ass from
the Geneva Conventions, and Richard Crowson's cartoon follows:

The editorial starts: "Several leading GOP senators are taking
a brave stand against the Bush administration's creeping moral
relativism on torture, which threatens not only this nation's
authority on human rights but also its success in the war on
terror." It then goes on to urge Sen. Sam Brownback to come out
against the bill, buttering him up with: "Brownback has been a
notable conservative champion of human rights abroad, opposing
the brutal treatment of prisoners in North Korea, Iran and elsewhere.
He was one of the first senators to back Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,
last year in his amendment blocking White House efforts to undermine
the Geneva Conventions." The piece concludes: "Instead of joining
a race to the bottom, Brownback should join those senators who are
holding America to its higher ideals." In fact, the editorial title
is: "Brownback should oppose torture."

It's hard to know how much of this was meant as irony, but one
point certainly is: by concentrating on Brownback, they showed up
Pat Roberts -- the supposedly more moderate Kansas senator who is
already firmly attached to Bush's ass. Brownback's independence
from Bush is more likely to swing even further to the right, but
it's not inconceivable he could take the bait here -- it would
fit his holier-than-thou image, would put some useful daylight
between him and Bush, and help set up the argument that Bush's
failures were shortcomings of his faith.

Of course, I find US use of torture appalling. Where I seem
to differ from the people who single it out as an aberation is
that I see it as symptomatic of a more basic, and ultimately
worse, problem: aggressive wars of imperial domination. Once
you start such wars, torture is just one of many horrors you
commit. To isolate it misses the point. In particular, torture
is not about obtaining information -- it's a matter of showing
folks who's boss, who has the power of life and death. Given
that the goal of the War on Terror is to cower folks into not
challenging your domination, it's easy to see where torture
comes in.

On the other hand, it's good that folks who haven't thought
the whole thing through at least recognize that they don't want
to represent themselves to the world as torturers.

Music: Current count 12361 [12334] rated (+27), 897 [901] unrated (-4).
Don't have all the new stuff catalogued, so the dip below 900 unrated is
temporary. Prospected through a lot of new jazz, but it keeps coming in.
This tends to go slower than Recycled, since the old stuff is easier to
decide on.

Black Eyed Peas: Monkey Business (2005, A&M):
Not as consistent as Elephunk, but almost as far over the top.
B+(*)

Common: Be (2005, Good/Geffen): Still negotiating
intricacies of sexual politics. Not sure whether he's a slow learner,
or just trying to be meticulous. B+(***)

Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2006, Geffen):
Didn't see the movie, but heard it was worth seeing. Never saw
him on TV, where evidently he was a big hit. Did see him on the
cover of Blender, which is tough to pull off without tits.
Soundtrack features a bunch of hip-hop acts, mostly slots for
the commercial end of alt -- Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Roots,
Blackstar, Dead Prez, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu. Leans hard, maybe
party scene, maybe live sound. Some spoken intros or transitions,
which may make more sense in the movie. Not bad, but nothing here
makes me feel like wanting to sort it all out. B

Dixie Chicks: Taking the Long Way (2006, Open
Wide/Columbia): The first three songs whine about how the country
bigots blacklisted them, but while they offer no apologies --
they're "Not Ready to Make Nice" -- they also manage to take "The
Long Way Around," studiously avoiding repeating the words that got
them into trouble: something about Bush being an embarrassment to
Texas. The fact is Texas has always been torn between the Waco
rightists who rule and ruin, and the Austin hippies that make the
music. They always came from Austin, but I wish they'd be more
forthright about it. B

Jackie Greene: American Myth (2006, Verve Forecast):
Singer-songwriter. Don't know much about him, but he's tuneful and
pleasant. Has me thinking this may be a pretty decent record, but
nothing jumps out until he cops a Dylan melody at the end, blatantly
enough I opted for the lower of two possible grades. B

Dinah Shore: The Dinah Shore Collection (1941-48
[1999], Vocalion, 2CD): Fifty cuts, not all that well documented.
A fine singer, but rarely enough to overcome a rather undistinguished
run of orchestras. First five cuts were on originally on RCA 1941-42,
picked from something like 75. The rest appeared on Columbia 1946-48.
B

Todd Snider: The Devil You Know (New Door): A couple
years back Snider came to Wichita, opening for his label master, John
Prine. His set recapitulated his live album, with wit clever enough
it helped to have heard it before. But what commended him to Prine
was only the start. Two albums later he rocks harder and his humor
has a dark edge, mostly because the losers he relates to but never
coddles have had rough years -- like the construction worker who
learned in jail to "watch what you say to someone with nothing/it's
almost like having it all." On the other hand, one song is about the
winners -- a couple of rich kids, frat boys, who always got away with
it, even at Camp David.
A

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 6)

Spent most of the week prospecting new jazz, putting quite a bit of
stuff up on the replay shelves. Didn't get to the replays -- the shelf
there is nearly full, so I'll probably shift to it this coming week and
start to pull a Jazz CG column together. No news from the Voice, nor
have I heard anything lately about Robert Christgau's future search.
It's been a rough week for me personally -- had a lot of work done on
the house, which has been taking much of my time as well as disrupting
my normal hours. Probably another 25 unplayed jazz albums in the queue.
I haven't been chasing things down, partly because I don't know what
the future will bring.

Mike Melvoin Trio: You Know (2006, City Light):
Website says he's been playing piano since he was three, so that gives
him 66 years of practice. Mainstream -- so mainstream I was surprised
to count five originals wedged in among the obvious standards. I was
further surprised to find myself enjoying such straightforward music.
And I was further surprised when I went back to the database and found
I had given his last album a B+. I notice now that the black and white
cover on the self-released album has a thin gold border, just like his
black and white website, so it would appear that he has an aesthetic
beyond DIY. It's too subtle to sink in, but too elegant to ignore.
B+(**)

Barbara Fasano: Written in the Stars (2005 [2006],
Human Child): Can't go wrong with Harold Arlen. As I recall, the
Arlen records stand out in Ella Fitzgerald's songbook series. I
even picked out Carrie Smith's Arlen tribute in my first Jazz CG.
I never tire of "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" or "Come
Rain or Come Shine" or "One for My Baby" and have no complaints
about the versions here. A couple of the more obscure songs may
drag a bit, but Fasano has a serviceable voice and a viable band,
including Joel Frahm on tenor and soprano sax, and this is a fine
survey.
B+(*)

Nick Russo + 11: Ro (2005-06 [2006], On the Bol):
Ambitious debut project. Russo plays guitar, and in simple contexts,
like just bass and drums, can be quite engaging. He also plays a
little tenor banjo, a very different sound that leads into his world,
or at least Indian, music interests. There are pieces with horns,
most notably Mark Turner. Pandit Samir Chatterjee plays tabla. At
least three tracks have Miles Griffith vocals, mostly scat effects.
Some of this swings easily, some breaks free, some just sort of
scratches along. I'm duly impressed, but don't see how it all adds
up.
B+(**)

Club D'Elf: Now I Understand (1998-2006 [2006],
Accurate): I can't say as I understand, but at least I'm intrigued.
This is a Boston-based group, with a core membership of one (bassist
Mike Rivard), three (website also lists drummer Erik Kerr and oudist
Brahim Fribgane), four (website photo) or five (insert photos, none
identified). The website also lists lots of "special guests" and
"rotating cast" and "occasional conspirators" -- some of each show
up now and then, plus there are a few others on the record but not
on the website lists (complain to the webmaster; especially the two
Kerr girls who make the irresistible closer "Just Kiddin"). Name
droppers will recognize John Medeski, Billy Martin, Mat Maneri, DJ
Logic, and maybe the Your Neighborhood Sax Trio. Jere Faison, Jerry
Leake, Jay Hilt, Randy Roos, and Mister Rourke appear with some
frequency, and the writing credits include a name that doesn't show
in the performing credits: Jeff Misner (I suspect turntablist Mister
Rourke). The music is long on world fusion grooves, layered pretty
thick, with "Vishnu Dub" typically self-explanatory and exemplary.
Jenifer Jackson gets a feature song. The brief "Introduction" could
be by MF Doom. It took them eight years to record all this, so I'm
not about to sign off on one play.
[B+(***)]

So Percussion: Amid the Noise (2002-06 [2006],
Cantaloupe): Three percussionists, schooled on Cage and Reich -- a
previous recording is of the latter's Drumming. Not much in
the way of a jazz feel: they like chime-like sounds which retain
discreteness and definitely do not swing. Back in the '70s I had a
minor interest in minimalism like this as well as more arcane forms
of post-classical music, but lost the thread and never picked it up
again. Thus far I'm ambivalent about this, but since it refers to
something out of my experience that, at least in principle, I might
pursue further, I'll keep this open, albeit far back on the burner.
[B]

DJ Logic: Zen of Logic (2005 [2006], Ropeadope):
Just have an advance here, although the record has been out for
months. DJ Logic (Jason Kibler) is the most likely turntablist
to show up on a jazz album, partly because he's able to draw so
much music out of his scratches, but also because his interests
in Miles and Trane led him into various jazz circles -- especially
those with an interest in bridging from the jazz end. Not sure who
all does what here, but the guest list includes John Medeski and
Charlie Hunter. Still, despite namechecking Coltrane, this is
very much on his home turf: hip-hop beats, lots of scratches,
a few raps. My only complaint is that I can't find the hook;
otherwise I like this kind of thing a lot.
B+(*)

Stanton Moore: III (2006, Telarc): Personnel
credits don't list Moore, but he's the drummer. He was probably
the main guy in Garage A Trois, whose Outre Mer ranks as
my favorite pop-jazz-fusion album of the Jazz CG era -- not that
it has a lot of competition. The key there was that they kept the
mix lean and the groove sharp. This is even leaner, a bare bones
organ trio, at least when the two guests -- Skerik on tenor sax,
Mark Mullins on trombone -- don't weigh in. It no doubt helps
that Moore's two bandmates have produced memorable albums on
their own -- specifically, ones that impressed me more for their
instrumental prowess than their overall achievement. The Hammond
guy is Robert Walter. The guitarist is Will Bernard. First cut
is just the three of them, something called "Poison Pushy," and
it clicks. Beyond that I'm less certain, but for now it's worth
noting that Skerik earns his keep. He's carved out a niche for
himself as a postmodern honker -- a Joe Houston for Coltrane's
kiddies.
[B+(***)]

Saborit: Que Linda Es Mi Cuba (2006, Tumi):
Campesino music from east Cuba -- at one point they translate
"campesino" as "peasant," at another they extrapolate: "This
is Cuba's answer to country music." Country, sure, like jibaro
is Puerto Rican country, but this isn't an answer to anything.
The group is named in honor of Eduardo Saborit, who long ago
wrote the title song. The group has been around since the early
'80s, but this is their first recording. Coming from the Cuban
Oriente, this is less Afro and more Spanish -- more guitar and
voice, less percussion -- than the urban music of Havana; as
such, it travels easily across the Caribbean, mixing son and
guaracha with cumbia. Not jazz, but too infectious not to note.
I have a pile of Cuban classics on my shelf. I wonder if this
will sound so good after I work through the masters.
[A-]

Ollabelle: Riverside Battle Songs (2006, Verve
Forecast): Five vocalists with a fondness for old-time music, as
opposed to the more recent old-timey variety, even when they write
it themselves. But their arrangements of old fare, including one by
namesake Ola Belle Reed, are easier to gauge. Especially striking
is "Riverside" -- as in "down by the" and "ain't gonna study war
no more" -- both for its complex layering and its weariness.
B+(**)

Solomon Ilori: African High Life (1963-64 [2006],
Blue Note): A Nigerian -- sings, drums, plays pennywhistle -- who
came to the US in the late '50s with the thought of introducing
African music to a nation that only knew it as a deep memory, Ilori
hooked up with Art Blakey on The African Beat, and got this
album as an afterthought. This is neither as high nor as lively as
the later, intensively guitar-charged highlife I'm familiar with,
and I wonder if the drummers were really on top of their game. But
the reissue has three long cuts from a later, much jazzier session,
with Donald Byrd, Hubert Laws, Bob Cranshaw and Elvin Jones jamming
with the drums and pennywhistle. They're fascinating, both on their
own and for the suggested dialogue that rarely followed. But then
who knew? Blue Note shelved them, until now.
B+(**)

Pete Zimmer Quintet: Judgment (2006, Tippin):
Drummer-led group. Seven credits for this "quintet": two bassists
alternate, except on two cuts that are just duos; the other extra
is tenor saxophonist George Garzone, who gets a "featuring" plug
on the front cover. Garzone's name usually pops up these days as
an educator -- seems like every saxophonist who's ever been to
Boston has stopped in for some pointers. He doesn't record much,
but has a distinctively muscular sound that is the main reason
for tuning in here. He also wrote four of nine, but only plays
on six. The other tenor saxophonist is Joel Frahm, who tends to
fit in neatly while Garzone stands out. Don't know pianist Toru
Dodo, but he does some nice work here.
B+(*)

George Lewis: Sequel (For Lester Bowie))(2004
[2006], Intakt): Mostly electronics, with "laptop" the most common
instrument, but guitar (Jeff Parker, Ulrich Müller), bass (Siegfried
Rössert), drums (Guillermo E. Brown), and the leader's trombone make
occasional appearances -- the latter most welcome. A lot of quiet
spots and odd, abstract, disconnected sounds. Somehow I think Lester
Bowie would have preferred something a bit funkier, but this might
have piqued his sense of humor. I wish it did more for mine.
[B]

Irčne Schweizer: First Choice: Piano Solo KKL Luzern
(2005 [2006], Intakt): The first record by the Swiss pianist since
I made her 25-year Portrait a pick hit. This one is solo --
no opportunity for interplay, like I saw so impressed with, and a
greater demand for inventiveness, which she more/less achieves.
Don't have it calibrated yet.
[B+(**)]

Mark Helias' Open Loose: Atomic Clock (2004 [2006],
Radio Legs Music): This one's so directly up my alley I'm a little
suspicious, or maybe just extra cautious. Aside from one cut, this
is a trio with Helias on bass, Tom Rainey on drums, and Tony Malaby
on tenor sax. Anyone who likes Tim Berne's records with Rainey will
have no trouble tuning in this one. All three are often terrific,
but I find myself nitpicking on the slower ones, where there's a
slight stall risk. The other cut adds Ellery Eskelin for a second
tenor sax, but it's one of the slow ones, more contrasting harmony
than joust.
[B+(***)]

Mario Adnet: From the Heart (2006, Adventure
Music): A Brazilian guitarist, but more notable as an arranger --
he passed his last album off as the work of studio legend Moacir
Santos, orchestrating his "things" for something like a big band.
He works outward from the supple sweetness that has long been
samba's soft spot, layering on various combinations of piano,
accordion, brass, vocals -- sounds progressive rather than
folkloric, but here and there works like magic.
B+(**)

Hamilton de Holanda Quintet: Brasilianos (2006,
Adventure Music): De Hollanda plays a 10-string mandolin. Backed
with acoustic guitar and electric bass, this group has a dense
string sound, which they crank up on the fast ones. Instead of
horns, the topping comes from Gabriel Grossi's harmonica, adding
sweet and sour notes on top of the propulsion.
B+(**)

Daniel Santiago: On the Way (2005 [2006], Adventure
Music): Three-fifths of Hamilton de Holanda's Quintet, the energy
level tuned down without the mandolin and harmonica, and with the
bassist going acoustic. Still, there is considerable bite in his
strings -- no nylon here -- even when he takes it slow, which isn't
all the time. I wonder how real aficionados of Brazilian guitar
will react -- I'm not one, but this strikes me as a notable example.
B+(*)

Philippe Baden Powell: Estrada de Terra/Dirt Road
(2006, Adventure Music): The son of legendary Brazilian guitarist
Baden Powell, Philippe plays piano and composes elegant pieces that
don't fit into any concept I have. Four pieces are trios. Others
bring in an isolated guest -- bass flute, trumpet, guitar, mandolin,
strings. Some are quite appealing, like the one with Myke Ryan's
trumpet. I suppose that lack of a conceptual hook is why I find
myself feeling so ambivalent about this, especially given that
the skills and evident intelligence make it so hard to critique.
B

Winds of Brazil (Um Sopro de Brasil) (2004 [2006],
Adventure Music): Eleven songs, each a feature for a notable Brazilian
wind musician -- flutes, reeds, brass, harmonica, backed by a large
strings and percussion orchestra. This is classical music in attitude
if not necessarily form, something safely removed to the concert hall
where proper folks give it proper respect.
C+

Willie Bobo: Lost and Found (1969-78 [2006],
Concord Picante): Dates are approximate -- not specified per cut,
they're gleaned from a booklet that really requires better eyes
than mine. Born in Spanish Harlem, played congas and
timbales, made his reputation in the '60s recording for Verve.
These odds and sods come from after he moved to L.A., where
he had a role on Bill Cosby's show; the finds are scattered
and discrete, of minor interest to non-specialists.
B

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe: Kobe Yee!! (2006,
Crab Apple): I need to pace myself here. This is one of four new
live big band recordings, differentiated by city -- don't know
what else, at least not yet. Just some random notes for now. The
baritone sax honks set the tone. Second cut erupts in blares that
remind me of the Batman theme -- such humor, inadvertent or not,
recurs periodically. Title track is leaner and stronger than the
rest, something for her "best of" anthology. The piano stands
out more than on her other big band albums -- at least the ones
I've heard so far. Three more to go.
[B+(**)]

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Nagoya: Maru (2006, Bakamo):
Fujii only conducts -- no piano on this one. Program has three of
her pieces, two by husband-trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, one by guitarist
Yasuhiro Usul. Band has five reeds, seven brass, guitar, bass, drums.
The arrangements are very tight, and the integration of the horns is
very effective, so you get the volume you expect plus nimbleness.
The guitarist gets some space, and is a plus. This could go higher,
but length and distractions caution me. The parts I managed to
follow closely are quite impressive.
[B+(***)]

Satoko Fujii Orchestra NY: Undulation (2005 [2006],
PJL): This is more what I expected from Fujii's big band, probably
because I've heard this group before, and I'm familiar with most
of the NY-based players. They're loud. Sometimes the sheer power
delivers the message. Sometimes it just overwhelms you.
B+(*)

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo: Live!! (2005 [2006],
Libra): The Kobe and Nagoya Orchestras are brand new, but Fujii has
worked with the Tokyo and New York groups for some time now, as they
represent her two bases. The New York group seems more of a free for
all, whereas this group seems tighter, even when they play as loud.
Avant-big band rarely works -- it's just awfully tough to keep all
the freedom from canceling each other out -- but Fujii is remarkably
adept as keeping her hordes together. Only the NY album strikes me
as having peaked. The Japanese groups open up some interesting
prospects for large scale arrangement. Comes with a DVD, which I
haven't gotten to.
[B+(**)]

Territory Band-5: New Horse for the White House
(2005 [2006], Okka Disk, 3 CD): Satoko Fujii still isn't the most
exhaustively documented jazz artist, even in the big band division.
Her four large orchestra discs are marginally outnumbered by Ken
Vandermark's Territory Band, with two releases this year totalling
five discs. I never got Territory Band-4 -- an oversight, I'm sure,
although I wasn't all that kind to Territory Band-3. This one is
in the same vein. It's difficult to distinguish between the ones
I've heard, as they all offer mixed bags of astonishing improv and
unfathomable noise, some of which is exhilarating anyway. Part of
the setup here is the use of electronics, but they still haven't
emerged from the background. Two studio discs, with two two pieces
each ranging from 16:43 to 25:30. The third disc is a live one,
with all four pieces reprised in only slightly shorter versions --
the short one actually gained a minute.
[B+(**)]

Paul Lytton/Ken Vandermark/Phillip Wachsmann: CINC
(2004 [2006], Okka Disk): Wachsmann's violin and electronics are
central, which makes this an alternate version of Evan Parker's
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, with Vandermark in Parker's shoes --
at least that was my thought on "Ljubljana 2," where his chosen
reed instrument is in the soprano sax range (although I suppose
it could be a clarinet, which he plays much more frequently). On
tenor sax he beefs up the rough sound. But the group as a whole
is much leaner, so the reeds matter more.j
B+(*)

Chet Doxas Quartet: Sidewalk Etiquette (2004 [2006],
Justin Time): Tenor saxophonist from Montreal, with his drummer brother
in the group, as well as a nicely developed keyboard player named John
Rooney -- plays Fender Rhodes as well as piano. Mainstream stuff --
Doxas sounds fine on the hard swinging stuff, but I find some minor
tics annoying when he slows it down.
B

Florian Weber/Jeff Denson/Ziv Ravitz: Minsarah
(2006, Enja/Justin Time): Normally I know what I like in a piano
trio, but have trouble describing it. Played this one at a time
when I couldn't write about it at all, but at least it passes the
"like" test. Minsarah is probably the group name, but as a first
album with the individual musician name above the line, I'd rather
file it that way. Denson and Ravitz both contribute compositions,
three and two to Weber's four. Reminds me a bit of E.S.T.
[B+(***)]

Kat Parra: Birds in Flight (2006, JazzMa): I get
nervous when I read about a singer's 3 octave range. For one thing,
I'm not technical enough to know whether I should be impressed. (I
do recall reading about Minnie Ripperton's 5 octave range, but I
was never impressed by her singing in any of them.) But the main
thing is that it suggests a preoccupation with voice over music,
a dubious and sometimes dangerous choice. That's unfair given how
much care she puts into chosing her music -- mostly Cuban, even
when the originals come from Jorge Ben or Duke Ellington -- but
is still a recurring thought when I hear her modulate. Where she
comes from and how she got here are probably interesting stories,
but not ones I've been able to find out much about. Evidently she
spent some time in Chile when she was young, now works mostly in
the San Francisco Bay Area, and studied with Patti Cathcart. A
couple of interesting songs here -- in particular, the Ben opener,
which starts in serious trouble and works its way out, eventually
dropping in a rap by someone named Pat Parra. Probably an untold
story there too.
B

Poor Trudy

Poor Trudy Rubin. She has brains enough to recognize when things
go horribly wrong, but when she tries to draw a conclusion from those
insights she short circuits into nonsense. Consider this, from her
column "Despite mess, we can't leave Iraq any time soon":

What Bush has neglected to say is that Americans face a bitter
choice produced by the mess the White House has made: Pull out
U.S. troops soon and face certain disaster, or leave them in to
enforce a policy that is failing.

There is, of course, a third choice: Change a failed U.S. policy.
Rethink what it would take -- in money, men and time -- to make Iraq
more secure.

The president no longer has the credibility to lead that debate.
Do Democrats have the guts?

That quote skipped over 75% of her column, which is about how
hopeless the situation in Iraq is -- no need to rehearse all that
here. Logically, there are two explanations for why the Bush gang
screwed this up so bad. One is incompetence, but the simpler one
is that it never stood a chance of working in the first place. But
before you can answer that, you need to know what "it" was, and
that's a subject Bush and company have yet to provide a clear
definition of. They had some short-term goals like deposing Saddam
Hussein and halting his non-existent WMD programs, but you know
that's not "it" because they weren't satisfied when they'd done
that. They had some long-term propaganda about democracy, but
that's not "it" either, because they kept interfering to push
their favored candidates and policies. Rather, "it" appears to
have been something like creating a docile client state, friendly
to Israel, with US "enduring bases" to intimidate neighbors like
Iran, and concessions to US companies to develop the oil industry.
The odds of something like that being passively accepted by the
Iraqi people are zero. That's why, no matter how incompetent the
Bush gang has been in Iraq, their cardinal sin was arrogance.

But if Bush's goals weren't impossible enough before invasion,
they've become all that more unattainable since. So, if the goals
are unattainable, why keep fighting? The conservative answer is
to postpone the discredit of having started and lost a major war.
You may gussy that up with something about how losing here would
undermine American prestige and embolden our enemies, then reach
for rhetoric like "failure is not an option" -- but for Bush this
is personal, since he was the one who lost. The liberal answer has
something to do with helping the Iraqi people: to settle with the
resistance to our invasion and occupation, to resolve the civil
war we started, to rebuild all the stuff we destroyed -- hey, why
don't we raise the dead while we're at it? The liberal answer is
as arrogant, as self-centered and self-serving, as anything Bush
has done. But worse than that, it's pathetic.

As president, Bush can act without having to disclose let alone
debate the details of his agenda. And he's so dug into his stance
that reforming him is out of the question. Indeed, any argument
that maintains a US role in Iraq, no matter how critical of Bush's
execution, plays into his hands by accepting that the US can play
a positive role. Which is why it's such a big problem that people
who actually know better, like Rubin, can't bring themselves to
say so. As for Democrat politicos, they need guts all right -- to
stand up for peace, equality, justice and freedom. But they also
need brains, which means rejecting confused experts like Rubin.

The Return of the Taliban

I've noted the relative paucity of reporting on the US debacle in
Afghanistan compared to the one in Iraq. One recent book may be of help
here: Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan
After the Taliban (Penguin Press). Chayes moved to Kandahar after
the Taliban's fall in late 2001, trading her journalism job to run an
aid organization. So her view is no doubt colored by her assumed stake,
but judging from David Rohde's New York Times Book Review, she has dug
deep into the history and culture of the Taliban's old stronghold.
Rohde writes:

Far more than a travelogue, Chayes's book is a detailed critique of
American policy in post-Taliban Afghanistan. She argues that a
combination of American ignorance and arrogance, an unwillingness to
confront Pakistan, and a need to divert American troops and resources
to Iraq caused the United States to implement a disastrous policy in
Afghanistan. The United States backed corrupt and dictatorial local
warlords, she writes, rather than engage in what Afghans desired: the
slow, costly and messy process of turning Afghanistan into a relatively
stable country with an Afghan form of self-determination. [ . . . ]

She contends that Gul Agha Shirzai, the warlord governor of
Kandahar, has been able to convince the American military officers
constantly rotating through the city that he is a loyal supporter of
the new Afghanistan. But in fact, she writes, he and his relatives hid
their own sweeping corruption, along with bitter complaints from other
tribes. Today, Afghans who long for a modern and stable country
express disappointment with Hamid Karzai and his American backers for
creating a hugely corrupt Afghanistan. In rural areas, support for the
Taliban is rising.

It's worth remembering that the Taliban's original rise to power
was based largely on reaction to warlord corruption -- for the most
part, the same warlords the US restored in 2001. The other base of
support for the Taliban was Pakistan. The Taliban fell quickly when
the US pressured Pakistan to back away, but evidently some degree
of Pakistani support has resumed. Rohde writes:

Chayes's most explosive charge is that Pakistan -- the United
States' supposed ally in the war against terrorism -- is actively
supporting the Taliban as a way to counter the spreading influence of
its regional rival, India. To placate the Americans, Pakistan
occasionally arrests a senior Qaeda operative. But at the same time,
the resurgent Taliban fighting and killing American soldiers in the
"new" Afghanistan were "manufactured and maintained, housed, trained
and equipped by stubborn, shortsighted officials in that very
Pakistani government," she writes. "I was at a loss to understand why
American decision makers could not see how suicidally contradictory
their alliance with Pakistan was. To us on the ground, it was
obvious."

Well, it's a complicated world. Given how little Musharaf has
gotten for Pakistan's War on Terror alliance, and how much risk he
runs, it's remarkable that he humors the US at all. On the other
hand, if the US pushed harder, they could break Musharaf's regime
in half, in the worst case scenario trading a nominal ally for a
hostile, nuclear-armed opponent. Such risks justify occasionally
looking the other way -- most likely, Musharaf is doing the same
with Pakistani factions supporting the Taliban. But the baseline
is that the US has long been willing to work with local tyrants
as long as they salute when we ask -- that warlord in Kandahar is
small fry but typical, and we keep them in the program by not
asking too many questions, least of all about who they torture
or how much they steal. It's not like we don't do the same.

Pakistani support for Taliban may help explain their recent
successes, but corruption and the Karzai regime's inability to
deliver any political and economic benefit to the countryside
provide the fertile ground necessary for revolt. What remains
to be seen is how it plays out within Pakistan itself.

Another New York Times Book Review book that looks interesting
is Sharon Weinberger, Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the
Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. Way back in WWII the US put
many of the world's most notable scientists to work on weapons --
especially, but not exclusively, in the Manhattan Project. Since
then, scientific quality has declined, but for a long time DARPA
actually developed some useful things in addition to the bombs and
guns -- the Internet is a major example. But for some time now many,
perhaps most, of their projects have been utterly useless, even for
such misbegotten purposes as dominating the earth or, failing that,
destroying it. The hafnium bomb is the prime example in this book,
but I get the impression such fantasies are the rule and not the
exception. The "Star Wars" anti-missile system was a major turning
point -- the DOD's prime example of politics trumping science and
reason. That the same dynamic has played out in so many other areas
implies that dumbing down wasn't invented in the Pentagon, even if
that's where it's been most heavily subsidized.

Lost in Afghanistan

War in Context cites two recent
articles
on Afghanistan that make for sobering reading. I was opposed to the
war in the first place for many reasons, but I've been ambivalent
about insisting on U.S. withdrawal, figuring that the continuing war,
with its inevitable damage, is rather limited, and at least partly
balanced by development efforts. However, it looks like the war has
turned. Graham Usher, in Al-Ahram Weekly, writes:

Brigadier Ed Butler was blunt. "The violence in Afghanistan is now
worse than in Iraq," he told a meeting of NATO's defense chiefs last
week. He was referring to the ferocious battles that have assailed
NATO troops since they took over most combat operations in Afghanistan
from US-led forces in August.

One theory as to why this has happened is that the war in Iraq
drained resources that were needed in Afghanistan, while inspiring
further resistance. However, the failure is more political and
economic than military -- not that the military approach hasn't
caused its own problems.

The military flaws have been compounded by a "corrupt and
inefficient Afghan administration without resources", says another
Afghan analyst, Barnett Rubin. Since 2001, billions have been raised
for Afghanistan, he says. However for every dollar spent on
development ten have gone on security and/or purchasing fealty to the
government of President Hamid Karzai. "Not a single new dam, power
station or major water system has been built, and only one intercity
highway has been completed," says [Ahmed] Rashid. The result is only
six per cent of Afghans have access to electricity, over half remain
impoverished and 63 per cent are illiterate. This is no better than
when the Taliban ruled under sanctions.

Iraq was doomed from the start, and there's been a lot written
about how and why that disaster unfolded. On the other hand, not
much has been written about Afghanistan, and the full measure of
the failure hasn't really sunk in, but when it does, it may even
more sharply limit the expectations of what US intervention can
accomplish. Afghanistan had several advantages over Iraq: foreign
troops generally took a support role to the Northern Alliance, so
the military footprint was relatively light and Afghanistan was
never really occupied by the US, as Iraq was; the US had a broad
international coalition, providing both troops and economic aid;
Afghanistan was so backward and so war-torn that even relatively
modest economic aid might have made a positive impact.

However, it now looks like none of that worked, and largely due
to the same fundamental flaws the Bush administration brought to
Iraq. The military was preoccupied with fighting and killing its
supposed enemies -- Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- and were insensitive
to the corrosive political effects of collateral damage, detaining
and torturing locals, etc. The US political operatives were more
concerned with symbols of success like Karzai's election than with
establishing broad, democratic representation -- no surprise, given
that the Bush-Rove view of democracy only recognizes elections that
can be won by the deepest pockets. Reconstruction and aid projects
were marked by the same corruption Bush has promoted throughout the
US government, both at home and in Iraq. Ultimately, these problems
are deep seated in the view that foreign policy should promote the
nation's interests, and that the nation's interests are defined by
what's benefits the ruling clique.

Still, Afghanistan is so poor we always figured that something
of value might have trickled down and been of benefit. Little of
that seems to have happened: on the one hand, Bush's contractors
have been remarkably efficient at pocketing government money and
delivering nothing for it -- most seems to go for "security"; on
the other, by continuing to haphazardly pursue the war for their
domestic political purposes -- and the drug economy figures large
in this -- they've kept the resistance going, making it impossible
to show any real progress.

The other article War in Context cites is an interview with UN
envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, admitting that the biggest mistake he/we
made was in not negotiating with the Taliban to bring them into
the post-invasion government. The US, of course, wouldn't allow
that, because we don't talk to our enemies. The effect is to drive
everyone who has a beef with us into a common defense. This is a
theme I've brought up again and again. Al Qaeda and the Taliban
are not one and the same. They are different groups with different
interests which we've joined together by treating them as one --
and note that Bush did this more out of arrogance and spite than
anything else.

Still, it's rather surprising how badly the US has fared in
Afghanistan. At least four provinces have reverted to Taliban
control, but the Karzai government seems to have little power
outside of Kabul. The latter has rather perversely turned into
a high-rent zone for foreigners, which undermines its potential
as an economic engine for Afghans. Whole chunks of Pakistan's
frontier provinces are under tribal control, providing redoubts
for Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The opium trade has grown huge,
possibly larger than Afghanistan's "legit" economy. And there
appears to be positive synergy between resistance movements in
Iraq and Afghanistan. That's something else we understand little
about -- in particular, how the fact of Iraq limits what we can
do in Afghanistan.

Like the proverbial bull in a china shop, maybe it would be
best for all concerned if we just left.

Quotations From Chairman Billmon

Another Billmon quote, from a
post on
Al Qaeda's war strategy that starts with a Mao quote, and lays
out some comparisons therefrom. The discussion of urban vs. rural
redoubts is of minor interest, but the following quote stands out.
Nothing here I haven't said elsewhere, but it bears repeating,
especially when well written:

How likely is that scenario? I don't know, and I don't know if
anyone does know. But the Cheney Administrations seem determined to
improve the odds by helping the jihadist movement overcome its
ideological deficiencies.

Like most extreme reactionary movements, Al Qaeda has no meaningful
economic or political program (Land to the Tillers, All Power to the
Soviets) to offer the Islamic masses. It's call for the strictest
possible interpretation of Shari'a law is divisive and repels rather
than attracts international sympathy. But what it does have going for
it are wide and deep fears of cultural penetration and Western
domination, and the ancient religious duty of all Muslims to defend
Islam and the community of believers.

These are precisely the fears the administration and the neocons
appear determined to stoke with their sweeping demands for
"democratic" but slavishly pro-American regimes, privatization,
women's rights, Western-style individualism, etc. Even worse, instead
of using public diplomacy to highlight and, where possible, promote
the enormous diversity of Islam, the Cheneyites are now doing
precisely the opposite. They're conjuring up the spectre of a vast,
monolithic and powerful Islamic fundamentalist movement, implacably
hostile to the West. They're implicitly and even explicitly defining
all who oppose their maximum program for a "new" Middle East as
extremists -- the enemies of civilization.

They should be more careful what they wish for, because they might
actually get it. This latest turn towards fear-mongering rhetoric is
practically an open invitation to any Sunni Muslim who supports
"traditional values" to line up with Al Qaeda. The Cheneyites are
going to great lengths to alienate people who might otherwise find the
jihadist ideology too radical and too destructive.

Gilles Kepel wrote the book on pre-Bush Islamism and found that
the movement was in decline and near bankruptcy before 9/11 -- its
key problem lack of appeal to most Muslims, even the relatively
devout. Casey Stengel used to say that the secret to successful
managing was to keep the guys who hate you -- every baseball team
has a couple at the far end of the bench -- separated from the
guys who aren't sure and could go either way. What Bush, Cheney,
et al. have done is exactly the opposite of that. They've taken
a very marginal problem that could be made even more marginal with
a modest show of decency on our part and built it up into a war of
the worlds -- presumably just because they thought that a little
war would be good politics.

Once you realize this, it's obvious that Bush's war only feeds
Al Qaeda and its kin, while abandoning the war leaves them without
their only attraction: their willingness to fight our imperialism.
In this regard, the anti-Islamist wars are nothing like Vietnam:
when we left Vietnam, it fell, because most Vietnamese preferred
their communist-nationslist liberation movement. No such outcome
is guaranteed in the Middle East -- even in Iraq, despite all we've
done to ensure the grizzliest outcome possible -- because popular
support for extreme Islamism depends almost exclusively on its
ability to fight the imperialists and their proxies. Take the
fight away, and you take away their usefulness.

More from the same post:

One can only hope the inherent limitations of the jihadist ideology
will outweigh even the Cheney Administration's mind-boggling
blunders. After all, if Hanoi and the Viet Cong had offered their
supporters nothing but hatred for the French and the Americans, with
no vision of a better future for the average Vietnamese peasant or
worker, would they still have won the war?

Maybe it's best not to answer that question. Hatred of the
colonizer, of the foreign occupier, is an incredibly potent force --
particularly when they are as arrogant, obnoxious and, above all,
clueless as the United States government seems to be now.

That last statement is particular apt. The understanding I grew
up with is that even when the people who run this country can't be
counted on to do the right thing (i.e., most of the time) at least
you can count on them to do something that more or less works. But
that no longer seems to be the case. Lester Thurow used to have
this notion that somewhere in the upper echelons of America there
was this Establishment -- the people who really controlled things
behind the scenes -- so the way to get reasonable things done is
to appeal to this hidden Establishment. They Bush-Cheney mob isn't
really the Establishment, no matter how much they flatter the rich
and promise to do their bidding. They're really just a bunch of
crooks and conmen who weaseled their way into big time power. But
what if the invisible hand that always seemed to keep America from
going over the deep end doesn't exist?

The War in Context

I haven't written much about the Middle East wars lately. Haven't
had a lot of time, and haven't had much to add other than to repeat
what I've previously said. The one fact that needs to be highlighted
right now is that while there is a ceasefire -- always described in
the media here as "fragile" -- in Lebanon, nobody has made any effort
to arrange a ceasefire in Gaza. The stranglehold there continues, with
grave effects, but the lack of interest elsewhere is perhaps the most
worrisome. Public opinion, especially in the US and Europe, has always
acted as a limit on what Israel could do, but if no one cares, what
keeps Israel from doing much worse? And how far can they go without
arousing those publics? Clearly, one thing that Israel did achieve
in Lebanon is that they pushed the West's tolerance for atrocity to
a point where, by backing off a bit, they appear to have gained some
leeway.

I haven't been following the news all that closely, but I want to
point out that the most useful website for me lately has been Paul
Woodward's The War in Context.
The following are titles of some of the posts there over the last
two weeks. I've added notes in some cases, but didn't track down
the permanent links. This is, after all, mostly news, and rather
transitory at that. Several stories do appear to be significant.
One is that Pakistan has largely given up on reasserting control
over frontier provinces effectively controlled by Al Qaeda. At the
same time, the US has largely given up on Anbar province in Iraq.
Both of these are rather astonishing admissions of defeat. Another
story is the Palestinian unity government, which seems likely to
at least get Hamas off the terrorism hook with Europe, and possibly
move towards a ceasefire there. Third, the US military, at least,
appears to be trying to squirm out of the War on Terror yoke. What
all of these suggest is a certain amount of exhaustion is setting
in. That doesn't add up to any chance of peace breaking out -- the
political mindsets, especially the wedged one in the White House,
haven't begun to come around.

Most recent first, going back about a week:

Taliban exposes cracks in Nato: Evidently, some members
-- France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are mentioned -- are reluctant
to commit to the request for 2,500 more troops, while "some nations
are carrying more of the burden than others."

Hamas declares EU to lift PA siege: Looks like Europe
will lift its economic embargo of the Palestinian Authority if/when
Hamas resigns and forms a unity government. In a separate article,
Blair said he would support this. However, another article announces:
U.S. wary of Palestinian plan.

What 9/11 means to Iraqis: "For Iraqis, 9/11 led us to our
current life of death and destruction. A sad moment for Americans was
the reason for a sad life for us. With 3,000 civilians killed every
four weeks, my country suffers its own 9/11 on a monthly basis."

IDF commander: We fired more than a million cluster bombs in
Lebanon: "In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified
that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden
by international law." Woodward adds a comment, quoting Ehud Olmert:
"The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed;
is that a loss?"

U.S. hopes Syria will join war on terror after embassy attack:
Tony Snow quoted as saying, "We are hoping they will become an ally and
make the choice of fighting against terrorists." Actually, Syria has
had a very effective war against terrorists going, partly because they
fight them at home, and partly because they don't double their risks
by allying themselves with Israel.

How U.S. merchants of fear sparked a $130bn bonanza: The
homeland security business. "The figures are stunning. Seven years
ago there were nine companies with federal homeland security contracts.
By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890." Indiana, with 8,591
certified terrorism targets, gets the most money.

Iraqi elections believed to have worsened divisions, report
says

A piece of the lame for the Middle East?: Tony Karon, on
peace prospects between Blair, Olmert and Abbas.

Why are we suddenly at war with "Islamic fascists"? A neologism
that signals a change in strategy as elections near: John Dean. "The
risk of death from an act of terror is at the bottom of any realistic
risk assessment list." Dean cites John Mueller: "the lifetime chance
of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in
80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor."

62,006 -- the number killed in the "war on terror": Counted,
at least; if other estimates of uncounted deaths "are included, then
the toll could reach as high as 180,000."

Bin Laden trail "stone cold": U.S. commandos "have not
received a credible lead in more than two years."

The basis for Iran's bellierence: Shlomo Ben-Ami, who
was in the Barak government: "The question today is not when Iran
will have nuclear power, but how to integrate it into a policy of
regional stability before it obtains such power. Iran is not driven
by an obsession to destroy Israel, but by its determination to
preserve its regime and establish itself as a strategic regional
power, vis-a-vis both Israel and the Sunni Arab states. The Sunnis
are Iran's natural foe, not Israel. The answer to the Iranian threat
is a policy of detente, which would change the Iranian elite's
pattern of conduct."

Army official: Rumsfeld forbade talk of postwar: "In
fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said 'he would fire
the next person' who talked about the need for a postwar plan."
Scheid retires in three weeks.

The Taliban, regrouped and rearmed: Peter Bergen.

U.S. accused of covert operations in Somalia

The Long War: A Self-fulfilling prophecy of protracted conflict --
and defeat: Michael Vlahos article. Note that the longer a war
lasts, the more likely it will be seen as defeat. As costs go up,
possible gains go down, and margins even faster.

"Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving
now"

Why Iran has the upper hand in the nuclear showdown:
Tony Karon.

Body count in Baghdad nearly triples

European watchdog calls for clampdown on CIA

In border zone, Pakistan backs off from Taliban: It looks
like Pakistan has given up on militarily penetrating its frontier
territories controlled by Al Qaeda or its allies, even signing a
peace accord. Inasmuch as Pakistan has been the only effective
force against Al Qaeda's upper echelons, that pretty much ends
the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Car bomb rocks Kabul near U.S. embassy, killing 16

NATO general wants more troops in Afghanistan south

Turkey's high-stakes march into Lebanon

Lebanese ports still blocked

Analysis: Terror war may need name change: The proposal
comes from "the chief of strategic planning on the Pentagon's Joint
Staff," which makes me think he wants out of the business.

The Great Decline

Yesterday I mentioned a long list of problems the Bush administration
has at best ignored, more commonly exacerbated, and in some cases flat
out caused. I didn't bother with the tiresome task of enumerating, but
Billmon has come
up with a reasonable summary, occasioned by the 5th anniversary of the
9/11 atrocity:

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in
Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and
environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the
corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian
brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving
down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If
anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin
memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot [the still-empty hole where
the WTC used to be] -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and
intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the
system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair,
leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or
what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence
czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS
locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless
there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved,
and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our
problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think,
security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't
count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches
are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or
GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset
bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the
People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down
or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to
think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value
that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be
a) totally out of touch, b) criminally negligent, c) hopelessly
corrupt, d) insanely hypocritical or e) all of the above.

The next line is: "It's getting hard to see how these trends can
be reversed." Then Billmon starts comparing the US to the Soviet
Union in the '80s. He recommends a book by David Satter: Age of
Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union. I have some
other reading planned on the post-fall depression. The thing I find
most interesting about Russia isn't the stupidity of the (especially
late) Communist years -- it's the absolute collapse of living
standards following the fall. We're so used to the idea of progress
that we have trouble seeing decline even when the facts are hard to
read otherwise. This collapse hit Russia so the hard life expectancy
metrics declined. A quarter or more of Russia's GDP vanished. There
are other examples scattered around the world, especially war-induced
losses like in Iraq, and war-inducing ones in parts of Africa.

In some measures living standards in the US have been declining
since roughly 1970. This has been masked by technological progress,
by debt accumulation, by scapegoating, and by political delusion.
Take medicine, for instance: science and technology have advanced,
but insurance and delivery of basic health care has in some cases
actually regressed, such that US life expectancy has finally begun
to decline, especially compared to other wealthy nations. But the
new stuff gets the press and sets the perception. Only when you
need it do you find out you can't get it, or it doesn't really
work, or something else goes wrong.

Immigration is another source of cover-up. Illegals provide low
skill labor that compensates for demotivating our own unskilled
labor. There's a lot of scapegoating over that, but more important
is legal immigration, which is needed to compensate for our failures
to educate and develop knowledge workers -- everyone from school
teachers to computer programmers to doctors. Immigration stimulates
the economy, but it also levels the world. It's not necessarily a
problem per se, but what it covers up is.

Beyond the obvious declines, there's a steady build up of risk
and liability, as well as plain old depreciation. I've been reading
complaints about not putting enough money into infrastructure for
decades now. It's like, if you have a house with termites, it may
look fine for years, especially if you don't look very close. Then
one day a gust of wind, or just gravity, will bring it down. That's
basically what happened to the Alaska pipeline. That's what happened
to the New Orleans levees. Katrina wasn't the big storm everyone had
so feared, but it was big enough anyway, because we didn't realize
how vulnerable we had become.

That sort of rot has been accumulating for a long time -- George
Brockway dated a lot of recent economic problems to the Republicans'
first attempts to dismantle the New Deal when they took over Congress
in the 1946 elections. Laws they passed like Taft-Hartley had little
immediate effect, but over time undermined labor unions and working
wages and the very principle of equal opportunity. Banking laws, as
well as later deregulations, have had similar long-term effects. The
long-term dip in growth rates occurred during the Vietnam War, which
had many other corrosive effects -- especially as the politicos have
dug themselves ever deeper in duplicity and cover-ups.

By now they have to keep denying, they have to keep runing from
the truth. Acknowledgment is failure, and as long as they keep from
failing they can pretend they're succeeding, which is what keeps
the whole scam going. But sometimes failure strikes too suddenly
and/or unshakeably to spin. The last five years have shown us some
examples like that.

Election Anxiety

Billmon has a post
on Republican plans to salvage the 2006 elections by pounding home the
only platform they have left to run on: digging up dirt on Democrats.
Deep down in the post, he reminds us that he's rooting for the Rovians
to just hang on to Congress:

As previously stated, I'm rooting (through gritted teeth) for the
Rovians to win this match -- or, more accurately, not lose it -- because
I think both the Cheney Administration's fake reality and the genuine
article have even more unpleasant surprises in store for this country,
and I don't think either the Democratic Party or the American
people can handle them at this point. (The plurality/majority may have
soured on internationalism, but I seriously doubt they're ready to
accept the kind of social and economic changes an authentically
anti-imperialist foreign policy would require.)

Personally, I tend to believe it will take a rather massive eruption
of reality -- and probably a catastrophic one -- to produce fundamental
political change in America, of the kind that might allow a progressive
left-wing movement to smash the Rovian machine, break the political
stranglehold of private wealth and bring the corporations, including
the corporate media, back under some kind of check and balance.

I've worried about something similar, which is that when/if anyone
starts to seriously tackle the major problems that the Bush years --
and of course most of them didn't start there -- the experience is
going to be so painful that it'll provoke a nasty backlash. You can
get a small taste of this by looking back at Carter, who made a real
attempt to address two deep problems -- inflation and oil imports --
and got trashed for his efforts. Reagan's election wasn't a turn to
conservatism so much as a turn away from reality, and the political
class, if not necessarily the rest of us, has been living in a fantasy
world ever since. That was easier to do when we were a country that
just had a few things wrong, but 25 years of systematic neglect has
left us in much worse shape.

Certainly the Democrats aren't prepared to take on such daunting
tasks: they are weak on war, meaning they don't have the principles
to oppose it, and they are weak on economics, not least because they
don't have the guts to stand up for their working class voters, and
they are weak and wobbly on almost every other issue that matters.
But I see at least two reasons for not siding with Billmon on this.

One is the Hippocratic Oath principle, which is to refrain from
making matters worse. If anything is clear by now, it's that any
margin the Republicans get, by hook or crook, will be extravagantly
abused. Taking Congress away starts to drive home the idea that they
can't get away with everything. Maybe it also makes it tougher to
advance their agenda, and maybe they back off from some of the most
extremist appointees.

The other is that powerlessness hasn't done the Democrats any
favors. Losing tends to draw them toward the center -- presumably
where their margin is, but that tends to muddy the issues, blunt
their opposition, and encourage passivity. Winning both emboldens
and provides more credibility in articulating problems and pushing
solutions. Even if they're not on top of those problems yet, they
have to start somewhere -- else nobody will.

One worry is that the political parties currently seem to be
locked in asymmetric warfare: the Republicans seem to be able to
do things and get away with them that the Democrats can't -- or
often would never even think of. Most of this has is based on
the Republicans' skill at manipulating symbols and controlling
the discussion, which leads us to worry about every downside,
knowing that we'll never hear the end of it. So what if the
Democrats take control of Congress? Then the Republicans will
blame them for obstructing the president, as if Bush would have
been able to solve everything if only he had a friendly Congress.
That fear exists because it's been done before: by Harry Truman
in 1948, and to a lesser extent by Bill Clinton in 1996. So if
that's a rule, the wouldn't it be better to lose in 2006 to set
up a sweep in 2008, after Bush and the Republicans have on their
own driven the country that much further into hell?

I was thinking 1930-32 might be a counterexample, but it looks
like the Democrats didn't quite gain control of either chamber in
1930, losing the House 216-218-1 (Farmer Labor) and the Senate
49-50-1 (Farmer Labor; the tie-breaking VP was Republican) in the
Senate, before sweeping in 1932. On the other hand, it looks like
due to replacing vacancies both House and Senate did change hands
between the 1930 and 1932 elections, which may be why I thought
of it. But what I suspect 1930 shows is not that the time for a
change wasn't yet present but that it's just hard to attain that
sort of realignment in a scattered set of Congressional races.

Postscript: In a subsequent post, Billmon quotes Andrew
Bacevich: "Those who think that merely throwing the rascals out
will remedy our problems are deluding themselves." Billmon adds,
"It's true, but you have to start somewhere."

Music: Current count 12334 [12305] rated (+29), 901 [907] unrated (-6).
Spent most of the week working on new jazz, so the prospecting notes are
pretty long, but not much here. Did a bit on Recycled Goods as well, and
didn't do my usual job of bringing those reviews back here. All in all,
a productive week.

Big Al Anderson: After Hours (2006, Legacy): He's
the founder of NRBQ, the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet -- a group
meant to be to rock and roll what the Modern Jazz Quartet was to
jazz, but wasn't because rock had no interest in genteel formalism.
This is warm, good-natured, folksy, everything you'd want except
great. B+(***)

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 6)

Coming off Recycled Goods, I started with some old comps, then
segued through a good portion of the queue. Looks like I have about
as many new records still unplayed. I figure next week will be more
first-pass prospecting, then I'll settle down and try to pull a new
column together. In doing so, I'll shoot for the minimum 1600 words
rather than the 2000-2400 I've been handing in.

I don't have anything more to report on my status re the Village
Voice. The music editor hasn't gotten back to me, and in any case
isn't necessarily the one calling the shots. Whether it would be
"weird" to continue publishing my column without Christgau's is one
dangling thread. If that's all it is, I suppose we could call it
something else and slip it by. Rob Harvilla did express an interest
in me continuing to do something on jazz for the Voice, so that's
another dangling thread. Where Christgau lands may or may not have
an effect. He's been talking to a lot of people, but I don't know
the details or whether any of it is even promising. My own best
suggestion is that he institutionalize himself, setting up some
sort of foundation for the advancement of rock crit -- in effect,
go back to being the Dean, a role he somewhat retreated from when
he gave up the music editor slot at the Voice to focus on his own
writing.

I'm willing to entertain offers or suggestions as well -- for
the Jazz Consumer Guide or some form of derivative. I've never had
much luck freelancing. I thought I had a gig at St. Louis Today a
week before they went out of business. I had something in D.C. set
up, then got sick and left town. Lester Bangs encouraged me to write
for Creem, then he quit and left town. I can think of three or four
other things that never panned out. I did get the Rear View Mirror
column at Seattle Weekly for a few months. I wrote part of Rolling
Stone's Record Guide, but they never offered me a review in
the magazine. I bugged Joe Levy at one point about doing a jazz
box there, which may or may not have led to David Fricke writing
one. I've tried pitching a diary-type column, loosely based on the
one British jazz curmudgeon Philip Larkin wrote. On the other hand,
I wound up writing for the Voice because Christgau saw some of my
samizdat and chased me down. And Recycled Goods was the result of
Michael Tatum wooing me. The work I did for Michaelangelo Matos
and Christian Hoard also came about after they approached me. So
I don't exactly feel I'm in the driving seat on all this.

One thing that the current up-in-the-air status has meant is
that I've been reluctant to chase down a lot of recent things.
The prospect of a Voice review has certainly been a major draw
for publicists, so I don't have a good feel for where I might
stand if that prop goes away -- indeed, whether I might still
be standing. Obviously, I can continue Jazz Prospecting Notes
as long as I get the material. That provides some exposure, and
is useful for anyone dedicated enough to wade through the blog.
I can always self-publish Jazz CG, but that sort of makes it a
self-indulgence, unless I try to make a serious run with
Terminal Zone. I can
try to work up some sort of jazz record guide -- the current
database rated count for jazz is 5427 records, which is way
short of The Penguin Guide but otherwise pretty substantial.
Don't know. Meanwhile, keep on doing.

Herbie Hancock: Jazz to Funk (1966-69 [2006], Aim, 2CD):
The booklet describes these as "some of Herbie Hancock's rarest and most
interesting recordings from the 1960s," but doesn't give much more than
hints about who did what when and where. As near as I can tell, the
first disc reproduces a 1969 album originally released as Kawaida
under drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath's name. The dominant personality on
the album is Don Cherry, who springs Jimmy Heath into a free frenzy on
soprano and tenor sax -- a dimension I've never heard before. Tootie is
also working way outside his normal bounds, with Ed Blackwell and James
Mtume adding to the percussion. Hancock and Buster Williams hold their
own in this group. Billy Bonner plays flute, and there are chants and
the like, giving this a period feel, not far removed from what Pharoah
Sanders was doing at the time. The other disc appears to be outtakes
from the 1966 sessions for the Blow Up soundtrack. This is more
conventional fare, with tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson standing out
in a group reportedly including Freddie Hubbard, Joe Newman, Phil Woods,
Jim Hall, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette. But, as is often the case with
soundtrack music, pieces vary: one called "Far Out" sounds like electric
bass, vibes, congas, and flute, none of which are documented. Nice minor
groove piece, as is the flute-dominated closer "Hot and Heavy."
B+(**)

Stanley Turrentine: Flipped Out on Love (1971-72
[2006], Aim): Again, only bare hints in the doc. The first eleven
cuts come from Flipped, an album originally released in 1971
on Canyon, and reissued on CD in 1995 on Drive Archive. That would
place it between his tenures at Blue Note and CTI. The idea seems
to be to go pop, with covers like "Brown Eyed Woman" and "Let It Be"
and a couple of Stevie Wonder tunes. With his creamy tone, He sounds
light and happy on those. The album closes with three songs from a
1972 Gloria Lynne album, also on Canyon, presumably with Turrentine
in the mix somewhere, but he's obscured by the big production, the
backing singers, and the general blight of ordinariness.
B

Charles Mingus: Thrice Upon a Theme (1954-57 [2006],
Aim, 2CD): More profiteering in obscurities, but this time the discs
aren't so obscure they pose any problems tracking down. In fact,
they're already on my shelves. The 1954 session originally appeared
on two 10-inch Bethlehem releases, which are combined -- different
song order from here -- in Rhino's 1999 The Jazz Experiments of
Charlie Mingus. They're a fascinating set of orchestral sketches,
seeds that Mingus developed over the following decade. The second
disc is a Hampton Hawes piano trio originally on Roulette originally
released as Mingus Three, reissued in 1997. For packaging, and
for that matter for documentation, I prefer the separate discs. Two
arguments for this one are that the aforementioned reissues are out
of print, and list price here isn't exorbitant at $16.98. Still, I
feel like docking it a notch for discographical confusion.
B

Mingus Big Band: Live in Tokyo (2005 [2006], Sunnyside):
Nothing new here: a thirteen-piece band trying to hold its own on a
repertoire made famous by groups half that size, and struggling in
the process -- I swear, the half-sized groups had twice the muscle,
no doubt because Mingus himself wouldn't accept anything less. I'm
sure it's fun to play this music, but mostly we just get are shadows
and reverberations of past glory. Maybe that's the point of ghost
bands, but it's been 24 years since Mingus Dynasty rose and 13 since
the Big Band debuted -- hasn't the novelty worn off? Midway through
I started thinking this might be my next dud, but then I remembered
I've already so honored a Mingus big band, and this is nowhere near
as lame as the Marsalis record. But it pulls its punches, and not
just on stage, as when they dropped off the second half of the title
to "Free Cell Block F, 'Tiz Nazi USA." I mean, do you really think
that Mingus himself would be less inclined to apply that title to
America today than he was in 1975?
[B-]

Charles Mingus: At UCLA 1965 (1965 [2006], Sunnyside,
2 CD): Alternate title, which didn't fit on the spine: Music Written
for Monterey 1965 Not Heard . . . Played Live in Its Entirety at UCLA.
The music went unheard at Monterey when Mingus got squeezed down to a
30-minute set. This was recorded a week later at a jazz workshop, and
retains the flavor of his early experimental workshops, as he lectures,
hectors, moves people around, and talks to the audience. As with the
workshops, it doesn't feel quite sorted out, and the penchant for long,
intricate orchestration isn't my favorite Mingus facet. The recordings
have been remastered from limited edition vinyl, which leaves some
question about the sound -- I have trouble following the patter, but
the music is in pretty good shape. Still working on it.
[B+(**)]

Chico Hamilton: Juniflip (2003-05 [2006], Joyous Shout):
The legendary cool jazz drummer turns 85 this September, and he's got
four new albums to celebrate with. That's quite a lot to deal with,
especially from a guy I've never paid much attention to -- only have
two of his albums in my database, both unrated Soul Notes from the
early '90s, although I must have a big pile of records he's played
drums on over the last 50+ years. (Well, small pile, anyway. Looks
like most of his session work goes back past Gerry Mulligan and Chet
Baker to Lester Young and Billie Holiday.) All four albums have the
same core group: Cary Denigris on guitar, Paul Ramsey on Fender
bass, Evan Schwam and Andrew Haddo on flute and reeds, and Jeremy
Carlstedt on percussion. Some have an extra flute/reeds player --
Karolina Strassmayer here, Geoffrey Countryman on two others. Most
have guests: trombones here, plus vocals by Bill Henderson (two cuts)
and Arthur Lee (one). But that's all set up. The record does little
for me, although there are things I like fine. The drummer has a
nice swivel, a little too fleeting to be called swing. The guitar
and drums amplify that, but also color it, and I don't much care
for their tones. The reeds provide more bulk, but as color they
are strictly pastel, and none are able to take command. So picture
them as grasses or flowers shuffling to and fro, swivelling from
the drums. That's fair enough as to represent Hamilton, but I'm
looking forward to four 70-minute albums of the same. The vocals
at least break things up a bit, and they're the best things here.
Not sure I've ever said that about Henderson before, so not sure
that's much of a compliment.
B-

Chico Hamilton: Believe (2005 [2006], Joyous Shout):
This seems to be a little more forthright than Juniflip, both
in the guitar and the saxophone. Nothing strikes me as bad, annoying,
or even boring, although at 72:47 it is plenty long. Fontella Bass
guests, singing three pieces. She never gets much traction, even on
her bread and butter gospel, and not just because Chico chills out.
B

Chico Hamilton: 6th Avenue Romp (2006, Joyous Shout):
Just have advances of the last two releases in Hamilton's quadfecta,
so I don't have session info. Hype sheet says this is, "an elegy to
'60s era L.A. which moves from Motown covers to a song entitled
'Elevation' that sounds like Coltrane sitting in with WAR (guitarist
Shuggie Otis, son of the great Johnny Otis, guests here)." Actually,
the credits put Otis on a different cut, but they're probably wrong.
But any case I'd worry more about Evan Schwam as Coltrane than anyone
as WAR. While "Ain't No Sunshine" is the theme here -- at least it
gets a reprise -- "Take the 'A' Train" isn't exactly a '60s L.A.
theme song. It turns out that "Elevation" ain't bad, but the sax
influence appears to be Wayne Shorter rather than Coltrane, and it's
a soprano. "'A' Train" is done with the vocal -- presumably Brenna
Bavis, the cut credits are screwed up here too -- and it ain't bad
either. But the only thing here that moves beyond "not bad" is a
guest shot on trumpet -- Jon Faddis.
B

Chico Hamilton: Heritage (2006, Joyous Shout):
I've played each of these albums twice, which means I've put about
ten hours into the series. A third pass might lead me to appreciate
the subtleties of Hamilton's art more, although I don't doubt that
I get the basic idea: he's always been a slippery fellow, and his
post-cool just scales his approach up through the band. He brings
a long history of references into the mix, but in the end they're
so uniformly integrated that everything reduces to consistency. A
third pass might just as well drive me to a pique of downgrading.
But neither is all that likely -- there's very little to dislike
even if there's also very little to get excited about. This last
volume is meant as an homage to Gerald Wilson, who wrote three of
the pieces. That means more texturing, which is not something this
doctor would prescribe. Two vocals by Marya Lawrence are the high
points. A third by Hamilton is a throwaway.
B-

George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band: Tiger by the Tail
(2005 [2006], TCB): Swiss pianist and big band arranger, Gruntz is
in his 70s now, and his Concert Jazz Band dates back to the '70s.
I've missed his records up to this one, so I have no idea how this
fits in, but a glance through the Penguin Guide indicates that the
size and personnel are highly volatile. He travels a lot and records
with musicians he finds along the way -- this was recorded in NYC,
hence a conspicuous number of Americans, several bringing their own
music. And clearly he prefers unleashing the musicians to see what
they come up with to trying to tame them in pursuit of some artistic
vision of his own. This blows up pretty quickly, with six trumpets
leading the charge, but settles down for some more intricate stuff
before the program ends. If someone like Pierre Dřrge is trying to
project a postmodern Ellington orchestra, Gruntz's analog would be
to Woody Herman -- not so far out, but raucous, rowdy, a platform
for soloists and rough-hewn teamwork.
B+(**)

HR-Bigband: Once in a Lifetime (2003 [2006], TCB):
HR, usually lowercased, stands for Hessische Rundfunk; i.e., Hessian
Radio. Based in Frankfurt, the group dates back to 1946, with Jörg
Achim Keller the director since 2000. Which makes it an example of
the sort of cultural institution that Europe does a much better job
of supporting than the US does -- just not a very inspiring one. It
does offer the usual big band virtues. And this record has slots for
two guests: organist Joey DeFrancesco and drummer Jeff Hamilton. The
former is conspicuous and often entertaining, providing a useful
contrast to the brass. I'd give you an analogue to Dřrge-Ellington
and Gruntz-Herman if I could think of one.
B-

Oscar Peterson/Ella Fitzgerald: JATP Lausanne 1953 (Swiss
Radio Days, Vol. 15) (1953 [2006], TCB): The pianist gets
top billing for endurance. He backs Ella on the first eight numbers,
then leads his trio with Ray Brown and Barney Kessel for the last
five. On one track, closing Ella's set, Lester Young leaps in and
Charlie Shavers piles on. Nothing here you haven't heard elsewhere,
except maybe Ella's short scat intro to "Lester Leaps In." Still,
Ella's "Lady Be Good" and OP's "The Surrey With the Fringe on Top"
are stellar.
B+(**)

Dave Glasser: Above the Clouds (2006, Arbors):
Mainstream alto saxophonist, has a bit of Paul Desmond's tone
sandwiched between slightly more vintage concepts of swing and
bebop. Plays here with a piano-bass-drums quartet, on a program
that's half original, half standards -- the former are minor
exercises, while the latter offer instant gratification.
B+(*)

The World's Greatest Jazz Band: At Manchester's Free Trade
Hall, England, 1971 (1971 [2006], Arbors, 2CD): The group
name is functional in several respects. For one thing it cautions
you that "great" and especially "greatest" are limits as well as
superlatives. There is, after all, a limit to how much greatness
any of us can really stand, beyond which the great become targets
for revolution. On the other hand, if you're Yank Lawson or Bob
Haggart -- two journeymen from the swing era, playing trumpet and
bass, respectively -- you can see that the prospect of assembling
a band with legends like Bud Freeman and Vic Dickenson and such
relatively young masters of the trad jazz craft as Bob Wilber and
Ralph Sutton might justify such hyperbole. Lawson and Haggart kept
the name going for a ten-year stretch (1968-78), shifting lineups
around along the way. This group includes Billy Butterfield, who
gets most of the trumpet features, Ed Hubble on trombone, and Gus
Johnson Jr. on drums. In the past, concerts like would have been
edited down to sharpen the impact, but at this late date they go
for history, keeping all the intros and applause, calling out
features for the stars. Sutton's stand out.
B+(*)

Ralph Sutton: At St. George Church, Brandon Hill, Bristol,
England (1992 [2006], Arbors, 2CD): Solo piano. I turned
the volume up to better follow Alyn Shipton's introduction -- the
two discs correspond to two BBC broadcasts -- and that helps. He
recorded a lot of solo piano over five decades, and I can't begin
to comparison shop, but this seems relatively informal, an old
master more at play than at work -- rearranging and transposing,
stringing medleys together, breaking for the odd story.
B+(**)

Alan Broadbent: Every Time I Think of You (2005
[2006], Artistry): Actually, they don't give a recording date --
2005 is a previous copyright date, which presumably gets us a bit
closer to the correct answer. Piano trio with Brian Bromberg on
"wood bass" -- seems to be an early 1700s Matteo Guersam double
bass or reasonable facsimile thereof -- and Kendall Kay on drums,
backed by the otherwise unidentified Tokyo Strings. Not the sort
of thing I often like: the strings fit the lushly romantic mode,
similar to what Broadbent did for Quartet West, but it was easier
to think that the cheesiness was ironical there. Broadbent's piano
tends toward lushness as well, but compared to the strings it is
a disciplinary force. By the end it wears on me, but early on it
had me wondering whether lushness is such a bad thing after all.
B+(**)

Luis Bacalov: Il Postino (1994-2000 [2006], CAM Jazz):
This is mostly the original motion picture soundtrack, composed and
conducted by Bacalov, plus a later version of the title track done
up by the Giovanni Tommaso-Enrico Rava Quartet. The soundtrack won
the Oscar for best original score in 1996, as well as numerous other
awards. It's a lovely piece of work, with clarinet and bandoneon
straddling the boundaries between folk and jazz. One vocal piece,
sung by Alma Rosa. Rava's trumpet at the end is subdued but sweet.
B+(**)

Edward Simon: Unicity (2006, CAM Jazz): Piano trio
with John Pattitucci and Brian Blade. Simon was born in Venezuela,
came to the US to study, was tutored by Harold Danko, hooked up with
Kevin Eubanks and Greg Osby, had something to do with M-Base, has
half a dozen albums, including a couple on Criss Cross. I've bumped
into him as a sideman, especially with Bobby Watson, but I can't say
I'm familiar with him. My bottom line on piano trios is that I know
what I like even if I can't tell you why. This one is especially hard
for me to pin down, but I like it enough to keep it in the queue.
[B+(*)]

Dave Holland Quintet: Critical Mass (2005 [2006],
Dare2/Sunnyside): I've played this four or five times, always thinking
that for such an obviously important record I shouldn't comment until
I'm able to say something deeper than "it has some good moments, but
it's awful goddamn long." Will keep it open, not so much because I
have hopes that it will eventually cohere, much less attain critical
mass; more like I might finally figure out what's wrong with it and
nab Chris Potter with that Dud he's been dodging ever since he got
unexpectedly strong. Not that I expect it's going to be his fault --
he has as many good moments as anyone. More likely the auteur, which
is what makes it difficult.
[B+(*)]

Fred Fried: The Wisdom of the Notes (2006, Ballet
Tree): The name always throws me. Presumably it's pronounced "free-d"
but as a rock critic I can think of several artists who adopted past
tense verbs as surnames, like Michelle Shocked. His bio doesn't mention
anything about having been a short-order cook, but it does emphasize
his debt to George Van Eps. Following Van Eps, Fried plays a nylon
7-string guitar. Last time I heard him accompanied with strings I'd
rather do without, but this trio, with Michael Moore on bass and Tony
Tedesco on drums, serves him especially well.
[B+(***)]

Mike Frost Project: Comin' Straight At Ya' (2006,
Blujazz): A Chicago group, led by the two Frost brothers -- Mike on
tenor/soprano sax and Steve on trumpet/flugelhorn. With organ and
guitar, they lean toward soul jazz, but the brothers keep returning
to classic bebop. The two percussionists don't resolve this one way
or another, and the fact that one is ex-Vandermark Five drummer Tim
Mulvenna means nothing. A likable record, but not much to it.
B

Anton Schwartz: Radiant Blue (2005 [2006], Anton
Jazz): AMG describes Schwartz as "influenced by Wayne Shorter, John
Coltrane and Joe Henderson as well as Dexter Gordon." That's nicer
than saying he was influenced by Bob Mintzer, but that's about what
it adds up to. He's breaks no new ground, but is so centered in the
tradition the old ground he covers reminds you of everyone. He has
trouble establishing his own sound, although I suspect the recording
has something to do with that. The group includes guitar and piano,
bass and drums. Guitarist Peter Bernstein is a definite plus. Pianist
Taylor Eigsti doesn't make much difference one way or the other. Not
inconceivable this could gain a notch if I gave it a chance.
B

Branford Marsalis: Braggtown (2006, Marsalis
Music/Rounder): A note in the booklet: "This album is dedicated to
the memory of Jackie McLean, John Hicks, Hilton Ruiz, Rosalie Edwards,
Stan Chin, Joyce Alexander Wein, Shirley Horn, John Stubblefield, Don
Alias, Ray Barretto, Roy Brooks, Keter Betts, Lucky Thompson, Percy
Heath, Arnie Lawrence, Jimmy Smith and Benny Bailey." A couple of
names there don't ring a bell for me, and others could have been
added, but it's been a brutal year. Good, therefore, that Branford
seems to be back in his game. This is his working quartet -- pianist
Joey Calderazzo gets some flashy solo spots, while Eric Revis and
Jeff Watts hold things together. The credits don't specify which
"saxophones" Branford uses, but he tends to charge hard on tenor
and wax eloquent on soprano -- not clear if there's an alto or any
other sax in his kit. Just played this while multitasking, so I
don't have any idea whether the booklet references to Chopin-like
nocturnes and Messiaen-like piano solos are just bullshit, I'm
pleased enough to keep it in play.
[B+(**)]

John Hollenbeck & Jazz Bigband Graz: Joys &
Desires (2004 [2006], Intuition): There's too much going
on here for me to wrap my brain around. The big band can function
as one instrument or many, but rarely as a set of individuals,
even the ones noted for their solos. Part of the complication is
Theo Bleckmann, credited with electronic effects as well as vocals.
The first piece is his show: he recites a Wallace Stevens poem
with little more than his effects for background. He appears
several times after, notably in the first and third parts of
the title set. The latter starts out in slow church mode, but
eventually shifts into something far more joyous. The middle
piece is an ecstatic dance, thoroughly delightful. But that's
only some of what's going on here. I may never get it all, but
this is one of the more remarkable discs I've heard recently.
[B+(***)]

The Diplomats: We Are Not Obstinate Islands (2004
[2006], Clean Feed): Money's tight everywhere -- certainly in the
jazz business, but all the more so in the jazz writing business,
especially given that all I'm guaranteed for the next Jazz CG is
a kill fee. When I'm deluding myself that writing this column is
something other than economic suicide, I often comfort myself by
thinking that at least I'm building up an amazing reference
collection -- in my no doubt even more impoverished retirement
I'll have plenty to listen to. To paraphrase Fat Freddie, music
will get you through times of no money better than money will get
you through times of no music. But what used to be my favorite
European label has come up with two ways of saving money that make
my life more difficult, not to mention what I just mentioned. One
is that they're shipping out cardboard sleeve promo copies instead
of something resembling the actual product. The other is that they
ship the promo lit in PDF files via email -- well, don't get me
started on the evils of PDF. So to review one of these records I
have to dig back through my email and save off the attachment and
bring up xpdf, at which point I discover that they're probably
cutting some more costs on their liner note writing. I hope that
at least they'll put some of that money back into the music, but
it's hard to tell from this one. The Diplomats is a meaningless
name. The band consists of Rob Brown on alto sax, Steve Swell on
trombone, and Harris Eisenstadt on drums. The music is free improv
from a gig in Rochester -- not much, although I'm always glad to
hear from these guys, especially Brown. One thing I've always liked
about Pedro Costa is his willingness to pick up a tape that makes
no business sense and put it out just because he likes it. At least
that much hasn't changed.
B

Whit Dickey: Sacred Ground (2004 [2006], Clean
Feed): Best known as one of the series of drummers in the David
S. Ware Quartet, Dickey has emerged as an interesting free jazz
leader. But regardless of what he writes, or how he centers his
drums, the fireworks come from the horns, with Rob Brown's alto
sax fleet and rough, and Roy Campbell's trumpet his perfect foil.
The fourth member of the quartet is Joe Morris, playing double
bass instead of his usual guitar -- although there's at least
one spot where he sure fooled me.
B+(***)

Ken Filiano/Steve Adams: The Other Side of This
(2002 [2006], Clean Feed): Filiano is a bassist I run across with
some frequency, and his presence on an album is always a good sign.
Adams I didn't recognize, although after throwing out some false
leads, I find that I should have known better. He plays all sorts
of woodwinds, with sopranino sax an evident favorite. Past credits
include Composers in Red Sneakers, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Your
Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet, Rova Saxophone Quarter, various
Vinny Golia projects, and at least three previous albums with
Filiano. These are just duets: 2-3 cuts each on sopranino sax,
alto sax, tenor sax, flute, and bass flute. They are interesting
in their detailed interplay, but not the sort of thing that might
known anyone's socks off -- the sort of thing I like when I manage
to pay sufficient attention, but I'd rather recommend records you
don't have to pay attention to in order to like.
B+(*)

IMI Kollektief: Snug as a Gun (2005 [2006], Clean
Feed): If Afro-Brazilian music is typified by its rhythms, what
happens when you try to transform it into free jazz? Is it still
in any meaningful sense Afro-Brazilian? That question comes more
from the PDF file than from the music, which has a streak of good
humor but nothing much that nails it down. Brazilian saxophonist
Alípio Carvalho Neto is the is the leading voice here, but the
group is international -- French, Belgian, Portuguese -- with
trumpet and vibes complementing the sax.
B

Dennis González Boston Project: No Photograph Available
(2003 [2006], Clean Feed): Recorded live in Boston on a sidetrip with
a quickly assembled group of locals: Either/Or Orchestra saxophonist
Charlie Kohlhase, bassists Nate McBride and Joe Morris, and a teenaged
Morris student named Croix Galipault on drums. The basses are central,
slipping into scratchy duets when the horns back off, or more often
setting up a pulse which the horns mimic and amplify. González had
largely slipped off the radar playing with his Dallas band Yells at
Eels, but this started an outreach that led to a remarkable series
of albums: NY Midnight Suite, Nile River Suite, and
especially Idle Wild. Compared to them, this is rough and a
bit tentative.
B+(**)

Myra Melford/Be Bread: The Image of Your Body (2003
[2006], Cryptogramophone): Looks like another slipcase promo, with
the press doc buried in MS Word files -- ugh! even worse than PDF! --
on a website, but this is an advance and I'm likely to see the real
thing before I finalize. Melford is one of the major pianists of her
generation, dazzling when she goes outside, delightful on the soft
inside fills. She likes to name her groups, even though this quintet
has three-fifths in common with last album's quintet, the Tent. This
starts off with her on harmonium, a hand-pumped organ she's studied
in India and Pakistan, although she returns to piano for most of the
album. Interesting group mix: trumpeter Cuong Vu and bassist Stomu
Takeishi lean toward fusion on their own; guitarist Brandon Ross has
some hip-hop on his resume as well as work for Butch Morris and Henry
Threadgill; drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee was last seen working with
Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman in Fieldwork. Lot of intriguing stuff
here to sort out.
[B+(***)]

Nels Cline: New Monstery: A View Into the Music of Andrew
Hill (2006, Cryptogramophone): Another advance, due out Sept.
26. Technical problems prevent me from quoting the bit in the liner
notes where Cline describes his idea of augmenting his trio -- the
so-called Nels Cline Singers -- with Ben Goldberg's clarinets and
Andrea Parkins' accordion to play a batch of some modern master's
music, and how it took him three or four seconds to settle on Andrew
Hill. He wound up adding Bobby Bradford's cornet as well, which
provides a bright contrast to what is otherwise a rather murky set
of instruments. No verdict as yet, but it has moments of promise.
[B+(*)]

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further
listening the first time around.

Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra: New Musical Kingdom
(2001-04 [2006], Clean Feed): I've only heard two of Lane's albums,
and he only has a half-dozen or so, so it may be premature to anoint
him as the new Mingus, but that there's even a contender for such a
unique role is quite a surprise. That he plays an imposing bass, he
composes pieces that are rooted in the tradition but fly off in the
most improbable of directions, and he runs a six piece band at its
advertised full throttle.
A-

Ben Allison: Cowboy Justice (2005 [2006], Palmetto):
When he got ticked off, Mingus used to slap political slogans onto
his pieces, figuring that -- this was the pre-Braxton era -- the
titles had to be words and if he had to use words he might as well
say something, like "Remember Rockefeller at Attica" or "Free Cell
Block F, 'Tis Nazi U.S.A." Reading Allison's notes -- photocopied,
because Palmetto pioneered the slipcase promos I've ragged on Clean
Feed over -- I'm reminded of Mingus, and of course of Charlie Haden --
perhaps a more immediate model for Allison, both as bassist and as
composer. But I'm also impressed by Allison's analysis. A sample:
"The title of the tune 'Tricky Dick' was inspired by the misdeeds,
lies and manipulations of Dick Cheney. Tricky Dick was originally
a nickname given to Richard Nixon, who was brought down by a crime
that was comparatively benign by today's standards. Now there's a
new dick in town. It's amazing to me how so many shadowy figures
from the past have reemerged and risen so far in contemporary
American politics." The music comes from somewhere else, including
his choice of instrumentation -- trumpet, guitar, bass, drums --
which he justifies by saying, "I wanted to rock." "Tricky Dick"
moves swiftly on Steve Cardenas's guitar roll, then Ron Horton
kicks in with high notes on trumpet. "Talking Heads" intensifies
the pace and the punch, something like a mariachi. "Emergency"
works a variation on W.C. Handy -- "nothing to do with love lost,
but instead is an expression of the anger and frustration I feel
as a result of the way the Bush administration responded to the
terrorist attacks of 9/11" -- with trumpet seething. Midway, the
opener reprises with "Tricky Rides Again" -- so infectious it
stands out on an album where everything stands up. The bassist
is never conspicuous here, but Cardenas and especially Horton
have never had so many good lines to play. If I had to pull the
CG together right now, this and Lane would be my pick hits, and
the column title would be something like "Bass Instincts."
A-

In writing the Clean Feed comment, I got to wondering about which
labels I have featured the most over the ten Jazz CGs to date. I went
through the list, awarding 3 points for each pick hit, 2 for each
A-list paragraph review, and 1 for each honorable mention. I also
counted duds, but didn't give the feature extra credit. I consolidated
some labels, but maybe not as many as I could. The tallies are as
follows (raw counts in parens; duds, if any, after semicolon):

18

ECM (0,4,10)

16

Clean Feed (2,4,2)

14

Atavistic (1,4,3;1)

14

Justin Time (Enja) (3,2,1;1)

14

Sunnyside (CAM Jazz) (0,5,4;1)

13

Fresh Sound (0,4,5)

12

Arbors (0,4,4)

11

Blue Note (Capitol, Mosaic) (1,2,4;3)

10

Okka Disk (2,1,2)

10

Thirsty Ear (1,3,1;1)

9

AUM Fidelity (High Two) (2,1,1)

8

Cryptogramophone (0,3,2)

8

High Note (ACT) (1,2,1;1)

8

Intakt (1,2,1)

7

Leo (1,2,0)

6

Cuneiform (0,2,2;1)

6

Pi (1,1,1)

6

Telarc (Heads Up, MCG Jazz) (0,2,2;6)

6

Tzadik (0,3,0)

5

Boxholder (0,1,3)

5

Concord (Stretch) (0,1,3;4)

5

Hyena (0,1,3;1)

5

IPO (0,2,1)

5

Playscape (0,2,1)

5

Sharp Nine (0,1,3)

5

Songlines (0,2,1;1)

5

Thrill Jockey (0,2,1)

I saw a press release that Concord was acquiring Telarc, which
would give them a combined score of 11 (0,3,5) plus a substantial
lead in the duds category with 10. Palmetto has 6 duds, with a
positive score of 3 (0,1,1). The only other sources of multiple
duds are Blue Note and Columbia (including Legacy) at 3 each,
Verve (including GRP) and Rounder (i.e., Marsalis Music) at 2.
Columbia has a positive of 4, Verve and Rounder 2 each. I don't
think the dud counts are all that significant -- I don't pick all
that many, and the reasons are pretty idiosyncratic. It strikes
me that the positives are skewed as well, in part because I tend
to avoid duplicating what Francis Davis writes about. Otherwise,
Verve and Palmetto would have cracked the list, while Blue Note,
ECM, High Note, and Pi -- maybe a few others -- would have scored
higher. Another factor hurt Leo and Tzadik: no mailing list,
which is worse than my complaints about Clean Feed.

Preventing Future Thinking About 9/11

The New York Times Op-Ed page has an especially inane piece on "10
Ways to Avoid the Next 9/11," where they asked ten "experts" -- like
White House homeland security advisor Frances Fragos Townsend, 9/11
commission majordomos Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, former NYPD deputy
commissioner for counterterrorism Michael Sheehan, and novelist William
Gibson -- who at least missed the point. A couple of Harvard law
professors argue "How War Can Bring Peace," while the former head of
security at Tel Aviv airport argues for "Less Political Correctness."
After all, who knows more about preventing terrorism than Israel?

The only piece that made any sense at all was by Jessica Stern,
who actually interviewed terrorists for her book, Terror in the
Name of God. On the other hand, the Times probably invited her
because she used to work on the National Security Council staff.
Guess they screwed up. Stern wrote:

Since 9/11, terrorism has increased significantly around the globe,
but the United States has been spared. Eurasia rather than America has
been the main source and victim. Why?

Increased awareness and surveillance have made a strike as
sophisticated as the 9/11 attacks far more difficult to achieve,
especially without local support. Unlike their counterparts in
Britain, for example, few of America's Muslims at least for now
subscribe to the notion that Western governments or their proxies are
deliberately hurting and humiliating Muslims and that the way to
restore dignity is to join a jihad. Moreover, terrorist strategists
like Ayman al-Zawahri have warned that while smaller strikes serve as
training opportunities for their fighters, major strikes can backfire;
attacking the wrong people at the wrong time would reduce the
popularity of their movement.

The jihadists understand that they are fighting a war of
ideas. According to "The Management of Savagery," a Qaeda manual, the
success of the movement will ultimately depend on the jihadists'
ability to damage America's prestige throughout the globe, sow discord
between America and its allies and expose the hollowness of American
values. The manual prescribes a strategy of forcing America "to
abandon its war against Islam by proxy" by provoking it into direct
military confrontation with a Muslim country. When the United States
attacked Iraq, it inadvertently "expanded the jihadi current" just as
Osama bin Laden's strategists had hoped.

Every foreign-policy decision entails tradeoffs in regard to
terrorism, especially with respect to the spread of the jihadist
idea. Attacking the wrong people at the wrong time can backfire, just
as Al Qaeda's strategists say. Let's not make that mistake again.

In other words, what Bush did to avoid further domestic attacks
was to play into Al Qaeda's hands. The idea that we shoud fight them
there so we won't have to fight them here is exactly wrong: because
we're there we tempt them to take the fight to us, which was the
point of 9/11. However, had we not responded in kind, their attack
would have exposed them as fanatic, further marginalizing what was
already a very marginal movement. Instead, by taking them seriously
we gave them the credibility they craved -- which they could never
have obtained on their own.

The absence of further attacks attests that Al Qaeda is still a
very marginal movement in the Muslim world. But with the Bush wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, saber rattling against Syria and Iran, and
carte blanche for Israel in Lebanon and Occupied Palestine, we've
shown reckless disregard for the rights and welfare of Muslims
across a broad swath of the world. We've been able to do this with
relative impunity because there's little the cavemen on the borders
of Pakistan can do to us -- except try to inspire Muslims close to
us to take their side. That has happened to some extent in England
and Spain when they were conspicuously allied with the US. That it
hasn't happened in the US is most likely because we still have a
relatively open society -- a freedom that Muslim immigrants and
residents weigh favorably against our foolish foreign policies.

One question is how fragile that balance is, especially given
that it only takes a small cell of people to produce a great deal
of terror. Racist profiling is likely to spur just such a break.
Same with more wars and their inevitable atrocities. But the real
question -- the one underlying the whole discussion -- never gets
raised: why should we have to fear terrorism at all? I won't bore
you with the long list of things that people in other countries
find offensive in US foreign policy, but I will ask what is the
tangible benefit we receive from this foreign policy that other
wealthy nations with nothing to fear, like Switzerland and Sweden,
forgo by adopting non-threatening foreign policies?

That question has to be asked, because if terrorism really does
become a constant everyday threat we will be doomed: the openness that
we currently enjoy, and that actually protects us, will succumb to
fear and paralysis, with no prospect of anticipating every possible
attack. This is the great irony of the War on Terror: the more we
fight the more enemies we have to defend against. In the long run,
such a fight can never be won. The amazing thing is that Bush and
company see this as politically advantageous. It's hard to tell
whether that's short-sighted, cynical, or plain stupid, especially
since the probable answer is all of the above. On the other hand,
the fact that anyone -- and don't forget that we're specifically
talking about the New York Times here -- can't see this fundamental
problem is what lets the short-sighted, cynical morons carry on.

Handed in another one today. Still haven't gotten around to trying to
scrounge up new non-jazz records -- Ghostface Killah and Be Your Own Pet
were purchases originally Consumer Guided by Robert Christgau, which I
don't have much to add to. Meant to do the new Todd Snider and Bob Dylan
albums soon, but got caught short once again and wound up delving into
the drafts folder. Not that I think repetition is such a bad thing.

I can report that I've made some progress on the integrated website
redesign project. At least, now the
F5 archive section has the redesign.
More sections to come, as I find time. As if I can find time.

Cox Correction

I added the following postscript to my Aug. 26
post
on Rev. Gary Cox's death and a Brent Castillo op-ed. But that's ancient
by now, at least measured in blog years, so I figured I should also post
it up top.

Postscript (2006-09-07): I got the following note from
Leigh Cox, the wife (now widow) of Rev. Gary Cox, correcting some
of my facts:

Rev. Dr. Gary Cox worked on an auto assembly line for only 3 years
in the late 1970s. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked as a
regional salesman for a division of ITT. He began seminary in 1996,
graduating from Phillips Theological Seminary in 1999 with a Master of
Divinity degree. Gary received his Doctor of Ministry degree from
Chicago Theological Seminary in 2005, after his cancer diagnosis.

I didn't see a way to patch up what I had written above, so just
noted the error, which comes around to reflect back on me. Not sure
if I knew about the sales work and just passed it over in favor of
the factory work. I tend to associate the latter with working class
notions of solidarity, which might have affected Cox's decision to
enter the ministry. On the other hand, factory work is often no more
than a way to make a living, and one shouldn't read too much into it,
especially for such a brief period. The sales background frames the
choice somewhat differently, but that may be wrong as well. I did,
of course, know that his ministry began before he was diagnosed with
cancer, and that he graduated from seminary before his ministry.

As I said before, I didn't know Cox, although I knew who he was,
and know people who held him in the highest esteem. But Cox did enter
into my fantasy world at one point. After our unspeakably vile member
of Congress dispatched a mediocre challenger in the 2004 elections,
I tried to think of who, or at least what kind of person, might be
able to mount a serious, principled challenge. I figured that one
way to counter the bible-thumping pro-life, even-more-pro-war right
would be to counter with a real minister -- one who actually grasped
the basic concept of doing unto others as you would have them do unto
you. Cox was the obvious choice -- in addition to his obvious virtues,
I figured name confusion between him and Rev. Terry Fox, the godfather
of the local Christian Right, might shift a few votes. I never got a
chance to promote this idea -- one minister I did broach it with had
no interest, and I see too much sense in that reaction to push it
hard. Jim Hightower's quip remains the rule of thumb: if God meant
us to vote, She would have given us candidates.

Good thing I'm an atheist, else I'd be real nervous about the
cosmic order.

What Katrina Wrought

The following appeared in the Wichita Eagle back on Aug. 29, one
year after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It's titled "New Orleans
Today" -- really just a list of numbers:

A year after the deadly and costly hurricane hit the Gulf Coast,
many things are very different in the New Orleans area.

New Orleans' work force has dropped to 444,200 from 633,800 before
the storm.

135,000 homes and apartments were damaged or destroyed by
Katrina. Only 38,600 building permits have been issued since the
storm.

Six of nine New Orleans hospitals remain closed.

Only 54 of 128 public schools are opening this fall.

60 percent of homes in New Orleans are hooked up to
electricity.

17 percent of the city's buses and streetcars are working.

23 percent of day care centers are open.

33 percent of restaurants and grocery and convenience stores are
open.

There are lots of interesting things you can unpack from those
statistics, although there is certainly more to the story. For one
thing, the federal government has spent quite a bit of money in the
area. That money has stimulated the economy, which would otherwise
be even worse off. But that money has mostly been spent on major
infrastructure projects, like rebuilding the levees. That's not so
unreasonable, but it's clear that the short-term construction boom
isn't reinvigorating the city. That's one reason for the discrepancy
between getting back to 2/3 of the pre-storm workforce but only 1/3
of the various service metrics.

But the other reason is that the disaster disproportionately drove
from the city its numerous poor. The services shortfalls are just
one reason the poor will be slow to return. But a deeper reason is
that the poor depend on castoffs and hand-me-downs, and that's what
the floods destroyed first and foremost. People of little means get
by on whatever marginal environments they can find. We're blind to
such niches, and when we do notice we seem them in negative terms --
as slums, as blight. So we can't conceive of rebuilding the city as
it was, even though it's politically fashionable to assert that the
city will rebound.

The rhetoric comes from our steadfast belief in progress. There
are many instances where progress has stalled, and indeed where
we've lost ground, but the slippage has usually been gradual. What
happened to New Orleans was sudden: half a major city was wiped
out in a day. Even if no similar storm returns -- not a prognostic
to bet on -- New Orleans will never come back, least of all like
it was. A big part of this is that we remain very confused about
what happened and why, but we're also quite confused about what
New Orleans was and how it got that way. Much of this confusion,
both before and after the fact, comes from our faith in the free
enterprise system. The idea that the invisible hand works to our
mutual benefit is comforting myth; what is certain is that the
invisible hand does things we don't see let alone comprehend --
like growing and decaying cities.

I went to the Wichita Public Library tonight, for the first
time in 3-4 weeks. I saw thirty or so books that looked like they
might be worth reading. I won't be able to read more than a couple
of those -- I'm stacked up to a ridiculous degree already -- but
I'm impressed with how hard so many people are working to try to
clear up many of the problems we face. I remember searching through
bookstores after 9/11 for anything that might help me to understand
that had just happened and finding virtually nothing. Now there are
dozens of books covering virtually every aspect of that and the
misbegotten War on Terror that followed. On the other hand, all
that effort has had little impact either on those in power, on
their apologists, on their so-called opposition, or on anything
having to do with popular opinion. I'm reminded once again that
in my own experience with companies on the brink of failure, no
amount of reason could alter their course.

Among those books, half-a-dozen were on Katrina, and another
was on a 1969 hurricane that took the same course with much the
same devastating effect. That book is Category 5: The Story of
Camille, Lessons Unlearned From America's Most Violent Hurricane.
The gist seems to be that political authorities were unprepared for
Camille and botched every aspect of responding to it, much as they
did with Katrina. As interesting as that one looked, I figured
another book looked more immediately useful. This is by Ivor van
Heerden and Mike Bryan, called The Storm: What Went Wrong and
Why During Hurricane Katrina -- The Inside Story From One Louisiana
Scientist. From the back cover:

It was a natural disaster -- but magnified enormously by
government's crushing incompetence in both preparation and
response. The storm leveled the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but man-made
problems destroyed New Orleans. The catastrophic flooding there should
never have happened. Properly designed and constructed levees would
have protected the city. Instead, they collapsed. Never in American
history was a natural disaster so fatally coupled with the systemic
failure of our government to protect and serve the people. The result
is the national tragedy known forevermore as simply Katrina.

Not sure I'll get to it either, but I like the technical emphasis.
Still, beyond that is a whole range of political and economic issues,
which I don't expect this book to handle. But understanding starts
with the technical details, and this book looks to be useful for that.

Looking again at the Eagle article quoted above, I find it curious
that the front page major title is "To dream amid decay" and that the
main picture has these words spread across the top: "A year after
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians hope their city isn't squandering
its chances for rebirth." Both messages signify confusion.

Double or Nothing?

The total number of US military deaths since Bush launched the
Global War on Terror has passed the number killed in the 9/11 attacks.
So at the very least, Bush's little game of double or nothing has
failed. It's hard to know whether the first half of those deaths
could have been prevented had the US adopted fair-minded policies
toward the Middle East: had we worked toward peace between Israel
and its opponents instead of reinforcing the worst tendencies of
Israeli militarism; had we avoided the games of supporting and/or
undermining local governments; had we not stationed our military
forces all over the region, in many cases replacing old colonial
powers; had we used our diplomatic and economic influence to urge
other powers to take similarly neutral positions. Had we done all
those things we certainly would be far less hated in the region,
and that would have made it much harder for Al Qaeda to recruit
suicide commandos, and it would have been much harder for Al Qaeda
to find local support and comfort for their acts.

But rather than wake up and take stock of what we had done that
made such attacks plausible, Bush chose to gamble on victory and
doubled the bet. Even this past week he keeps jabbering on about
the necessity of total victory, as if he can double or nothing
until he finally wins and gets out of the hole. As if this is a
game where one can do any such thing. It isn't. It's just a game
where both sides lose until both are exhausted. The deaths are
just the most conspicuous measure of how much we've lost. Those
who keep thinking that we still have any prospect of coming out
ahead have lost something critical: their minds.

Music: Current count 12305 [12268] rated (+37), 907 [931] unrated (-24).
Don't have everything catalogued right now, but I'm close. Sorted through
a lot of Recycled candidates. Was less effective with new jazz, then mostly
wiped out over Labor Day weekend. Still, anything +30 is quite a week.

Be Your Own Pet (Ecstatic Peace): Nashville teens
with a rock solid backbeat and enough noise to fuzz up the requisite
attitude. They probably won't last now that a founder has quit to
look for a nice college, but this won't be the last you hear from
at least some of them. Note "Parental Advisory Explicit Content"
logo. Presumably that's to warn your parents to stay away. A-

A Flock of Seagulls: We Are the '80s (1981-86 [2006],
Jive/Legacy):
MTV started broadcasting in 1981, ushering in the era of the rock
video. TV had promoted rock as far back as Ed Sullivan's showcasing
the Elvis Presley's upper half, but MTV's videos were shot and cut
more like advertisements -- fast cuts and subliminal titillation.
Why anyone watched them is a question you should ask someone who
did -- I hated them from the start, not so much for what they were
as for how they impacted the music. This worked two ways, both bad:
they made it more expensive to promote new music, and they selected
for looks rather than for music. It's easy to see why the industry
loved MTV: it gave them a new channel at a time radio was shifting
toward talk, and it gave majors an edge over independents. The idea
here was to take groups best known for their videos and package both
video and audio on DualDiscs, but after delays they backed down to
CD only -- which makes the selection effect on the music that much
clearer. This group was founded by a couple of hairdressers, but
their unassuming new wave bubblegum holds up pretty well without
their hair styles -- probably better.
B+(***)

Merle Haggard: Live From Austin TX (1985 [2006],
New West):
Austin became the alt-scene for country music when Willie Nelson
packed up and left Nashville, but there's nothing like the blessing
of television to bring a factoid to national consciousness. That
happened around 1976 with PBS airing Austin City Limits, or
1978 when Merle Haggard first appeared. New West has started tapping
into the archives for a series of DVDs, which needn't concern us
here, except that some have been released audio only. At 45:57,
this is shorter than I'd like. It also tilts a bit toward the Bob
Wills songbook -- visiting Texas has that effect on Hag. But he's
in fine voice, and the band swings plenty.
A-

Willie Nelson: Live From Austin TX (1990 [2006],
New West): Typical show with his family, a band that itches to slip
in a little country jazz; includes a scrunched up medley where he
tries to kill off "Funny," "Crazy," and "Night Life," plus too many
Kris Kristofferson songs, and Shelby Lynne singing backup.
B+(*)

The Essential Jim Reeves (1953-68 [2006],
RCA Nashville/Legacy, 2CD): The sort of country singer folks referred
to as Gentleman -- in other words, the antithesis of honky tonk; he
became a star under Chet Atkins' guidance, the calm, reassuring voice
of countrypolitan Nashville, but crashed his plane before turning 40 --
proving that you don't have to live fast and love hard to die young
and leave a beautiful memory. B+(*)

Texas Tornados: Live From Austin TX (1990 [2006],
New West): The Tex-Mex supergroup, with Doug Sahm and Augie Myers
from Sir Douglas Quintet, conjunto accordionist Flaco Jiminez, and
the one and only Freddy Fender; appearing just after their first
album, which they fill out to nineteen songs with their oldies; I
could do with less of Sahm's cheerleading, but you can hear why he
was so psyched. B+(**)

Jazz Prospecting (CG #11, Part 5)

As expected, I spent most of this past week working on Recycled Goods,
so the early entries here are old music. Did listen to some new stuff
toward the end of the week, mostly indecisively. Still need to talk to
the Voice regarding future Jazz Consumer Guide columns and/or what
else they may be interested in. Given that the column functions in
the shadow of Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide, I'm not exactly in
the driver seat here. Christgau is entertaining other offers for his
column, which may not survive: what he does takes a tremendous amount
of work, and he expects to be paid accordingly. I don't have any such
expectations, but that hardly puts me in a better position. I suppose
if anyone does have an idea or interest they should get in touch with
me. Meanwhile, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. Christgau tells me
he's still working on a CG without a publisher as well.

The Miles Davis Quintet: The Legendary Prestige Quintet
Sessions (1955-58 [2006], Prestige, 4CD):
The back story is well known. Davis signed with Columbia and organized
a quintet to record 'Round About Midnight. The rhythm section
was Red Garland, Joe Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. After Davis' first
saxophonist, someone named Sonny Rollins, refused to tour, Philly Joe
brought in one of his homeboys, someone named John Coltrane. But Davis
had a problem: he still owed Prestige a bunch of albums. They cut one
quick in late 1955, then wrapped up with two long days, one on May 11,
the other on Oct. 26, 1956. Prestige carved those sessions up by mood
to get four albums: Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and
Steamin', but held them back to cash in on Columbia's publicity.
The quintet only cut the one album for Columbia, so Prestige's quickies
came to represent what was eventually recognized as Davis' First Great
Quintet. The five albums fill three discs here, with 36-minutes worth
of previously unreleased bait on the fourth, including three cuts with
Bill Evans replacing Garland. The remarkable thing about the music is
how natural it all sounds. The scion of East St. Louis has given us a
near-perfect synthesis of West Coast cool and East Coast hard bop, as
if it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
A-

God Bless the Child: The Very Best of Billie Holiday
(1935-42 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): Minor nitpick: the booklet has a
page with a short bio and some cross-references: influenced by,
influenced, musical associations. The latter list is: Lester Young,
Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Benny
Goodman, Count Basie. The latter is well known trivia: Basie gave
Holiday a job, but never bothered to record her -- something he may
have regretted the rest of his life, if you can imagine Basie ever
regretting anything. Basie doesn't appear here, nor do Peterson and
Kessel, who didn't meet up with Holiday until the '50s. The others
are fair choices, but the main thing is the one who's missing: Teddy
Wilson, who appears on 8 of 14 cuts here, many originally released
under Wilson's own name. This collection splits roughly in half
between Wilson's all-star groups, where Holiday was just one of
the greats, and Holiday's own much more anonymous orchestras. The
former are a lot more fun -- that guy who sounds so much like Benny
Goodman is, after all, Benny Goodman, and that game goes on and on:
Ben Webster, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Bunny Berigan, Buck Clayton,
Artie Shaw, a whole lot of Roy Eldridge, and an all-time great on the
piano. But Holiday own half holds up just as well: her orchestras
closed ranks behind her, and no one ever sang songs like "Body and
Soul" and "Solitude" like her. Of course, you don't need this: it's
pulled from nine CDs anyone who cares about not just jazz but any
kind of American music should already own -- unless you sprung for
the 10-CD box instead.
A

One O'Clock Jump: The Very Best of Count Basie
(1936-42 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): Basie's Columbias have never
gotten much respect -- after all, his 1937-39 Decca recordings
represent the full fury of the territory band storming through
New York; but Lester Young, for one, peaked here with "Lester
Leaps In" and "Taxi War Dance," and padding with the early
Jones-Smith Inc. spinoffs and later live shots doesn't hurt;
a useful primer for anyone who doubts the 4-CD box.
A

Night in Tunisia: The Very Best of Dizzy Gillespie
(1946-49 [2006], Bluebird/Legacy): Three small group cuts with Milt
Jackson and Al Haig lay out the principles of bebop, with the rest
of the disc devoted to Dizzy's big band, including six key cuts with
Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo. A narrow slice of a brilliant career,
not the "very best" so much as the truly momentous.
A

Come On-a My House: The Very Best of Rosemary Clooney
(1951-60 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): In the late '70s she made a comeback
as a standards singer, which moved her into the jazz shelves, but back
in the '50s she started recording pop junk for Mitch Miller -- inspired
sometimes, but the ballads and novelties, duets with Bing Crosby, big
band bashes with Billy May and Nelson Riddle, not to mention Pérez Prado
go every which way but together; she was a trooper, and this is a
valuable reference.
B+(***)

Send in the Clowns: The Very Best of Sarah Vaughan
(1949-87 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): One of the most incredible voices
ever, but her records are extremely spotty, with adoring arrangers
putting her on pedestals of statuesque music. Unlike past Sony comps,
this limits her 1949-53 period, which I've always found overbearing,
to two cuts. For the rest, it jumps to 1973 for five from Live in
Japan, then finishes with massive orchestras that do her no favors.
She's always been a difficult project for me. I've listened to about
ten records, and found things I'm impressed with -- even some jazz
settings I like. You'd think someone would issue a comp that would
consolidate her pluses, but I've yet to see one that does. They all
hew to a different siren.
B-

Sneakin' Up Behind You: The Very Best of the Brecker
Brothers (1975-81 [2006], Arista/Legacy): I remember being
nothing less than shocked when I was reading a history of jazz in
the '80s a few years back and found out that Michael Brecker was
considered the most influential tenor saxophonist of the decade.
I barely knew who he was: a lot of session work, a fusion band
with his trumpeter-brother Randy, and a small number of albums
that never sounded interesting enough to check out. Of course,
I've heard a good deal more since then. I'm less shocked now,
but I can't say as I'm much more impressed. Michael Brecker has
some impressive chops, and he cuts loose with some scarifying
runs here, but I still wonder to what purpose. Like so many
fusion bands, this one has problems with the beat, even when
Marcus Miller lays out a gold-plated funk groove. Only on the
closing live cut does the band hold interest without the horns.
But with the horns you can sort of hear what folks hoped for
from fusion.
B

Von Freeman: Good Forever (2006, Premonition):
At 84, he's been good a long time, but he's never sounded this relaxed
before. The quartet with Richard Wyands on piano, John Webber on bass,
and Jimmy Cobb on drums is impeccably mainstream, with a rich ensemble
sound. Freeman still has that scrawny, constricted, wheezy tone that
makes him instantly recognizable, although it only becomes conspicuous
when he reaches for a note that isn't there. Otherwise, he reminds you
that the loveliest thing in the world is to hear a tenor saxophonist
stretch out on a ballad.
[B+(***)]

Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Lontano (2005 [2006], ECM):
Too early to tell whether a record so understated and so subtle will
develop into something wondrous or fade into oblivion, but I expect
to stick with it. The Wasilewski-Kurkiewicz-Miskiewicz rhythm section
deserve to be household names even though the odds against that are
as long as their names.
[B+(***)]

Jason Moran: Artist in Residence (2006, Blue Note):
It must be hard thinking up new things to do each time out. Five cuts
here build around Moran's trio -- bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer
Nasheet Waits -- plus guitarist Marvin Sewell. One of those adds Ralph
Alessi on trumpet and Adou Mboup on African percussion for an ensemble
I'd like to hear more of. The other start with Moran solo, in one case
an intense dialog with percussionist Joan Jonas -- another idea that
could be explored further. Less successful are the voice pieces: two
cuts with samples of Adrian Piper have some hip-hop airs, while the
soprano of the suspiciously named Alicia Hall Moran moves into aria
territory. The only thing that holds it together is the piano, and
Moran's about as good as that gets these days.
[B+(**)]

Don Byron: Do the Boomerang: The Music of Junior Walker
(2006, Blue Note): This is self-explanatory, especially once you know
that most of the cuts have vocals -- four each by Chris Thomas King and
Dean Bowman. Also note that Byron's main credit is tenor sax, with only
one cut each on clarinet and bass clarinet. He's played a bit of tenor
lately, and has some baritone credits, but for years he steadfastly
promoted the clarinet and did more than anyone to bring the instrument
back into prominence. He also has a soft spot for jump blues and jive,
much as he has for klezmer. But still I don't get why he's doing this.
And while it's a bump up in sophistication from the originals -- much
cleaner sound too -- I'm not sure that's the right idea.
[B]

Stefon Harris: African Tarantella (2006, Blue Note):
This seems at first like it may make it on concept: the subtitle is
"Dances With Duke" and the pieces come from Ellington suites. The
first three come from The New Orleans Suite, and a bit of
Steve Turre trombone near the top sounds promising. But it turns
out to be the only instrument in the group with any bite to it --
the others are flute, clarinet, piano, viola, cello, bass, drums,
and the leader's mallets, and the combination bogs down when the
music slows up.
[B]

Papa John DeFrancesco: Desert Heat (2006, Savant):
Joey's father. Although he started earlier, his recorded career has
followed in his son's footsteps. Joey helps out here, producing and
playing otherwise undefined keyboards. Bass and drums fill out the
group, so the organ dominates, the whole thing depending on how much
you like the grinder's groove. I like it fine on "Cold Duck Time"
and I'm surprised I can't complain about "House of the Rising Sun."
But I also don't see much point, especially given that the groove
doesn't always hang tough.
B

Mike LeDonne: On Fire (2006, Savant): Live at Smoke,
NYC. LeDonne plays Hammond B3, with a good group for this sort of
thing: Eric Alexander on tenor sax, Peter Bernstein on guitar, Joe
Farnsworth on drums. Seems like a throwaway concept-wise, but they
all have fun, and Alexander is in especially potent form.
B+(*)

Louis Hayes and the Cannonball Legacy Band: Maximum
Firepower (2006, Savant): After breaking in with Yusef Lateef
and Horace Silver, Hayes played drums in Cannonball Adderley's Quintet
from 1959-65. That covers their heyday, giving him as much right as
anyone to go back to the well. Still, this wouldn't work without
horn players who matched up well with the Adderley brothers. Vincent
Herring fits in nicely on alto sax, both in terms of speed and tone
on the rare occasions when this slows down a bit. Jeremy Pelt, if
anything, kicks brother Nat's trumpet role up a notch -- you can
tell why he's winning all those polls. Piano set is split between
Rick Germanson and Anthony Wonsey. Bass is Richie Goods. I started
pretty skeptical, but this is gaining on me.
[B+(***)]

No final grades/notes on records put back for further listening
this week. Early on in the cycle it's more important to survey the
incoming.

Recycled Goods #35: September 2006

Recycled Goods #35, September 2006, has been posted at
Static
Multimedia. There's an "In Series" section on Stax Profiles,
a rather iffy set of the Memphis label's artist comps, as well as a
new Rhino set of Wilson Pickett, a Stax Studios visitor whose work is
retained by WEA. That's the only one of Rhino's The Definitive
Collection series I bought -- they don't send me stuff, and I
don't buy much, so the coverage there is spotty. I didn't go into
alternate choices on Otis Redding there, but you should know that
at least three album reissues are straight A or better: The Great
Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, Otis Blue, and The
Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul: Complete and Unbelievable.
Others like Love Man and The Dock of the Bay are a
notch lower. He was so great that compilations rarely improved on
or usefully consolidated the albums, but the long out of print 3-CD
The Otis Redding Story is still the best.

I did go into some alternates to The Genius of Charlie Parker,
mostly because I still regard Rhino's Yardbird Suite as the better
general purpose intro, but also to better frame the selection. Genius
reduces the two big Savoy/Dial boxes down to reasonable size. There are a
couple of things I would have done differently -- e.g., I much prefer "Red
Cross" to "Tiny's Tempo" from the same session -- but overall it's a fair
selection. Whether it deserves a full A grade is something I'm not fully
sure of -- I gave it the benefit of the doubt for its historical value,
and cut it some slack for the Royal Roost shots on the theory that it's
good to be able to judge for yourself. But I may also have finally been
cowed by the Bird cult. I've never been a fan, and I've gotten plenty of
crap for that over the years. But I've also decided that two of my main
complaints about Parker aren't really his fault: the big one is over his
role in steering jazz away from popular music; the smaller one is his
role in the heroin epidemic that affected half or more of the major jazz
musicians of his period. I can't go into the details on either, but both
issues loom larger in myth than in fact, and it's ultimately the myth of
Charlie Parker that bothered me more than the fact.

This makes 35 Recycled Goods columns, bringing the total number of
albums reviewed to 1475.

I'm mostly recycling old reviews, including the Perceptionists from
last year, but fiddling with the words. The Bob Rockwell review got quite
a bit of rewriting, mostly because it occurred to me that local readers
might not know who Ben Webster is. But when recycling the biggest problem
is digging up some contrasting duds -- which I avoid in real life -- or
even near=misses.